Benchley, Peter - Novel 08

by Beast (v5. 0)

  “Not if St. John wants to study it like he says.”

  “Prick doesn’t want to study it. He wants to keep it. He knows what it’s worth.”

  “That’s not what he says.”

  “And since when has he become a frigging paragon of truthfulness?”

  “Whip …” Barnett sighed. Something made him look aft—a glimmer of light, maybe, or a sound—and he saw Mike standing in the darkness, holding across his chest a three-foot gaff with a honed four-inch hook on the end. “You know what we’re gonna have to do.”

  “Yep. Go back and tell Dr. St. John to suck eggs.”

  “No. We’re gonna go back and get a dozen more coppers and come back and take the raft.”

  “Not without somebody getting bruised.”

  “That may be, Whip, but think about it: That happens, you’re gonna end up in jail, we’re gonna end up with the raft, and who’s gonna get the last laugh? Doctor St.-fucking-John.”

  Darling looked away, across the dark water of Mangrove Bay, at the lights of the cars crossing Watford Bridge, at the glow of lanterns on the veranda of Cambridge Beaches, the hotel nearby, where some bygone singer was warbling along with the band, telling the world he did it His Way.

  Darling wanted to fight, wanted to rage and defy and storm around. But he swallowed it, because he knew Barnett was right.

  “Barnett,” he said at last, and he started down the ladder, “you are the soul of wisdom.”

  Barnett looked over at Colin, who let out a big breath and smiled back at him.

  “Dr. SINjin wants my raft,” Darling said as he strode aft and took the gaff from Mike, “Dr. SINjin shall have my raft.”

  He stepped over to the raft and raised the gaff above his shoulder and slashed downward at the bow. The hook plunged through the rubber, and, with a pop and a hiss, the cell collapsed.

  “Whoops!” Darling said, “sorry,” and he dragged the raft toward the bulwark. He slammed the hook into another cell, and it deflated, and he hauled the sagging rubber up onto the bulwark. Something small fell from the raft and hit the steel deck with a click and rattled away. He withdrew the hook and stepped back and drove it through the aftermost cell. He yanked upward and held the raft in the air over the police boat. The muscles in his shoulders were afire, and the sinews in his neck stuck out like wires.

  “Whoops!” he said again, and he dropped the raft into the police boat, where it landed in a heap of hissing rubber. He turned back to the two policemen and dropped the gaff on the deck and said, “There. Dr. St. John can have his bloody raft.”

  The policemen looked at one another. “Okay,” said Colin, as he quickly stepped off onto the dock. “We’ll tell Dr. St. John that’s how you found it.”

  “Right,” said Barnett, and he followed Colin. “Looks to me like a shark got it.”

  “And there was a sea on,” Colin said. “You couldn’t go into the water after it, sharks all around… . ‘Night, Whip.”

  Darling watched as the policemen piled the raft in the stern of their boat and started their motor and backed away into the darkness. He felt drained and slightly nauseated, half-pleased with himself and half-ashamed.

  “There’s always the dive charters during the big race layover,” Mike said. “They’ll turn us a pretty dollar.”

  “Sure,” said Darling. “Sure.”

  *

  As they cleaned up the boat, stowing gear and swabbing down the deck, Darling felt something small and sharp under his foot. He picked it up and looked at it, but the light was bad, so he dropped it into his pocket.

  “See you in the morning?” Mike said when he was ready to go ashore.

  “Right. We’ll give the aquarium the bad news, see if they want to trust us with more gear. If not, we’ll start chipping paint.”

  ” ‘Night, then.”

  Darling followed Mike up the path to the house, waited till Mike had started his motorbike and driven away, then shut off the outside lights and went inside.

  He poured himself a couple of fingers of dark rum and sat in the kitchen. He debated turning on the news but decided not to: All news was bad news, by definition, otherwise it wasn’t worth putting on the TV. And he didn’t need any more bad news.

  Charlotte came in, smiled and sat down across the counter from him. She took a sip from his glass, then reached for one of his hands and held it between hers.

  “That was childish,” she said quietly.

  “You saw?”

  “Police don’t stop by every evening.”

  He shook his head. “Whoreson Irish bastard.”

  “What did you accomplish?”

  “D’you know how sick it makes me feel to feel so helpless? I had to do something.”

  “Did it make you feel better?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Sort of …” He looked at her. She was smiling. “Okay, you’re right. I’m an old fart with a baby’s brain.”

  “Well… you’re cute anyway.” She leaned across the counter and took his chin and drew him toward her.

  As he rose up to kiss her, something stabbed him in the thigh, and he yipped and jerked backward and fell into his seat.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’ve been punctured.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the thing he had stepped on and put it on the counter.

  It was a crescent-shaped hook, not of steel but of some hard, shiny, bony substance.

  “What have I gone and stabbed myself with now?” He picked it up and pressed it into the counter, trying to bend it. It wouldn’t bend.

  “It looks like a claw,” said Charlotte. “Tiger, maybe. Or even a fang. Where’d you find it?”

  “Fell out of that raft,” he said. He hesitated as he recalled the marks he had seen on the raft, like cuts in the rubber. He looked at Charlotte, then at the thing, and he frowned and said, “What the hell … ?”

  9

  IT HUNG IN the deep and waited.

  Motionless, invisible in the blackness, it searched with its senses for the vibrations that would signal the approach of prey.

  It was accustomed to being served, for the cold, nutrient-rich water at a thousand feet had always been host to countless animals of all sizes. It had never known, never needed, patience, for food had always been abundant. It had been able to nourish its great body by reflex, without struggle or severe exertion.

  Its skills were those of a killer, not a hunter, for it had never needed to hunt.

  But now the rhythmic cycles that propelled the creature through life had been disrupted. Food was no longer abundant. Because it had no capacity for reason, knew no past and no future, it was confused by the discomfort caused by the unfamiliar sensation of hunger.

  Instinct was telling it to hunt.

  It felt an interruption in the flow of the sea, a sudden irregular static in the water’s pulse.

  Prey. In numbers. Passing by.

  They were not near, they were somewhere distant, somewhere above.

  The creature drew quantities of water through the muscular collar of its mantle, then expelled it through the funnel in its belly, driving itself up and backward with the force of a racing locomotive.

  It homed on the signals and thrust itself through the water with spasmodic expulsions from its funnel. It recognized the signature of the signals: fish, many fish, many big fish.

  Chemicals coursed through its flesh, altering its colors.

  When it judged itself close enough, it spun and faced the direction where its prey should be. Its huge eyes registered a flash of silver, and it lashed out with its whips. The clubs at the ends of the whips fastened on flesh, their toothed circles tore at it, the crescent-shaped hooks erect within each circle slashed it to shreds. Within seconds, all that remained of the fish was a shower of scales and a billow of blood.

  The creature’s hunger was not allayed, however—it was increased. It needed more, much more.

  But the pressure wave generate
d by the displacement of so much water by the movement of a body so huge had alarmed the school of bluefin tuna, and they had fled in phalanx.

  And so the searching whips found nothing. The shorter arms at the base of its body gradually ceased moving; the gnashing beak closed its jaws and withdrew into the body cavity.

  Hunger now consumed the creature, but exhaustion also restrained it. Vast amounts of energy had been expended, and yet it had found too little with which to fuel its enormous needs.

  It drifted, hungry and confused.

  The bottom far below was ridged, and the current that swept up from the abyss propelled the creature slowly along a slope to a plateau at five hundred feet. The cool water eddied here, so the creature rose no farther.

  On another slope, up ahead, was something large and unnatural, something that its senses told it was dead, except for the routine life forms that grew upon it.

  The creature ignored it, and waited, gathering strength.

  1O

  LUCAS COVEN WAS so annoyed, and so impatient to get this day over and done with, that he put his boat in gear and leaned on the throttle before the winch had the anchor snugged up. He heard the big steel flukes thud against the hull, and he could envision the nasty gouges in the fiberglass, which made him even angrier.

  He was always doing this, getting himself in over his head and then, captive of his bullheaded pride, refusing to back off. He was a fisherman, for God’s sake—had been, anyway—so where did he get off playing Jacques bloody Cousteau?

  It was his mouth that betrayed him every time. He swore that if he made it through today without a calamity or a lawsuit, he’d never go into a bar again—or, if he did, he’d sew his lips together and drink his vodka through a straw.

  Once clear of Ely’s Harbour, he turned south. He looked down from the flying bridge to make sure his two passengers hadn’t fallen overboard or speared one another or dropped something serious on a foot. They were down there on the stern assembling their diving gear—compasses, knives, computers, octopus regulators, buoyancy vests, still cameras, video cameras— good God, they had enough gear to equip an astronaut for a month on the back side of the moon.

  They had said they were expert divers, had insisted on showing him their Advanced Open-Water cards. But in Lucas’s mind, people who decked themselves out in all that machinery weren’t divers, they were shoppers. Sure, diving could be complicated, if you wanted to mess with all that chemistry, but it didn’t have to be. A savvy person made it simple: Wear a bathing suit so nothing grabs you by the balls, flippers for your motor, a mask so you can see, a tank of air to breathe, a few pounds of lead to keep you down, a depth gauge in case you get absentminded.

  Besides, that girl, Susie, looked like she didn’t need gear—she had a set of lungs on her that should take her to a thousand feet on a single breath. Gear just spoiled the picture, covered up all the golden-brown skin, the mane of yellow hair that when he first saw it had made him catch his breath. She was a prime candidate for that Sports Illustrated special issue.

  But they were high-tekkies, these two. Like most everybody these days, they relied on electronic doodads to do their work for them. Common sense and gut instincts were becoming a thing of the past.

  Well, he hoped one of them, the boy or the girl, still had a ration of common sense, because where they were going, the only thing the costly toys might do was provide a record for the coroner.

  That thought brought Lucas another fit of anger. Maybe he’d pay someone to remove his vocal cords.

  His first mistake had been to go to the Hog Penny Pub for his five o’clock smile. He never went to any of the tourist bars on Front Street: The drinks were overpriced and undergenerous. But a pretty girl had stopped on her motorbike to ask him directions, and she’d said she went to the Hog Penny every day, and why didn’t he come by for a drink later on, and so he’d shaved his face and changed his shirt and dropped by. Naturally, the girl never did.

  His second mistake had been to hang around long enough to destroy a twenty-dollar bill, because even at tourist prices, twenty dollars bought him enough fuel to generate heat in his belly and tamp down his native quietness.

  His third—and by far most serious—mistake had been to put his mouth where it didn’t belong, into a conversation between two young people he didn’t know.

  He’d been dazzled by the girl from the moment he saw her, but he had no ambitions about her because the boy she was with was just as good-looking as she was, in his way, just as tall and blond and tan. Lucas imagined them to be a matched pair from some scientific stud farm, programmed to breed a race of beauties. They looked so much alike, they could have been brother and sister …

  … which, he later learned, was exactly what they were: twins, just out of college, down here staying in their parents’ house out by the Mid-Ocean Club. He gathered that their father was some big-shot tycoon in the broadcast business up in the States.

  Because Dr. Smirnoff had Lucas well in tow by now and was deluding him that he was as smooth as Tom Cruise, Lucas began to fancy that he might actually have a chance with this heart-stopper. Her getup alone should have been warning enough: No girl with a real-gold Rolex watch, a gold pinky ring and one of those five-dollar golf shirts with the fifty-dollar polo player on it—let alone the satin skin and teeth as perfect as piano keys—was likely to give a thought to some scraunchy, ragged-haired boat-jockey in tattered jeans. But Dr. Smirnoff was driving.

  They were consulting a set of decompression tables, wondering aloud if they should have decompressed after their last dive and planning how deep they could go on tomorrow’s dives—all of which should have rung alarm bells in Lucas’s head since, first of all, no visitors were ever taken on deep dives in Bermuda and, second, deep diving wasn’t something sensible people did by choice.

  Lucas didn’t say a thing while the two discussed the depths of the various shipwrecks they had been on, comparing the Constellation to I’Herminie, the North Carolina to the Virginia Merchant. None of them lay deeper than forty feet—breath-hold range for anybody but a consumptive. He wasn’t tempted to correct them when they talked about the Cristobal Colon versus the Pollockshields, two iron ships so shallow you had to take care not to hit them with the boat.

  He had found his opening when the boy—Scott, his name was—said something like, “The boat guy said the deepest wreck around’s the Pelinaion.”

  “Where is it?” asked Susie. “Will he take us to it?”

  Lucas leaned forward and turned his head toward them and said, ” ‘Scuse me. None of my business, but I’m afraid somebody’s pulling your chain.”

  “Really?” Susie’s eyes opened wide, and Lucas decided that she had the longest eyelashes he’d ever seen.

  “Yep. Like I say, none of my business, but I hate to see you get a bum steer.”

  “What is, then?” said Scott. “The deepest wreck.”

  “The deepest shipwreck in Bermuda,” Lucas said with a smile, so charming, pleased to find that his mouth was working even though his lips felt kind of numb, “is the Admiral Durham. It’s off the South Shore. Leastways, the deepest one anybody’s ever seen.”

  “How deep is that?” Scott had a look that said he didn’t believe a word of this but that he had nothing better to do just now than humor Lucas Coven.

  “She starts at a hundred and ninety, then angles down the slope to about three hundred.”

  Susie said, “Wow!”

  Scott said, “Gimme a break… .”

  Looking back, Lucas wished he’d said something terminal like, “Piss off, Junior,” something that would have sunk the expedition right then and there.

  But Susie had given Scott a punch on the shoulder and said, “Scott! Listen, for once in your life,” which meant she was interested.

  So Lucas had let his mouth keep running.

  “She ran up on the South Shore in a storm and hung there a day or more while they tried to pull her off. They got her free okay, but she was
holed so bad that before they could patch her she filled up and went, slid back down the hill.”

  “And you’ve seen it,” Scott said.

  “Once, years back. She’s not so easy to find.”

  “What was it like?” Susie asked, all eager.

  “Gets your blood to racing. I call her the Widow-maker.” He didn’t, but it sounded good. “For a long time you don’t see anything at all. Then all of a sudden she looms up out of the deep, and your first thought is, Man, I must be narcked. ‘Cause what you see is a great iron ship that looks to be sailing right up at you. Then, what downright convinces you that you’ve got the vapors is that there’s this no-kidding locomotive train engine lying right beside her, fallen off the bow. Just about the time your head clears, it’s time to go. You only get about five minutes at that depth.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Scott.

  Lucas said, “That’s your privilege,” and motioned for a refill.

  Susie put a hand on Lucas’s arm, actually touched him, and, with a glance at her brother that told him to keep quiet, said, “Our treat,” and gestured to the bartender to give them a couple of beers and Lucas another vodka.

  That was the moment when Lucas knew he had them. And because he was enjoying himself and trying to figure out where to take Susie when they managed to ditch Scott, he didn’t think the time would come when he wished he hadn’t.

  When the drinks came, Susie said, “Excuse us a minute,” and she took Scott’s arm and led him off by some empty tables. They stayed over there, whispering, for three or four minutes, gesturing at one another, and when they came back it was Scott who started the ball rolling.

  There had been no stopping it.

  Did Lucas think he could find the Admiral Durham again?

  Probably, with the new electronics on the boat.

  Would he be willing to try?