by C. J. Waller
I sway upright.
“He… he was… he… right behind?” Janos manages.
The urge to cough grips me again as sticky tendrils of dread clutch as my throat. No one speaks as we scan the water's edge.
Nik is nowhere to be seen.
Chapter Three
We called out over that ancient sea for what felt like hours, hoping that our cries would bring Nik back. But he never answered. He's gone. One by one, we abandoned our fruitless searching (if you call screaming someone’s name over and over again whilst splashing about in the shallows of some god-forsaken underground sea ‘searching’) and sat on the cold rock of the headland. We didn’t speak. I was freezing, but since there was no way to warm myself up, I didn’t complain.
Someone sits next to me, heavily. It’s Janos. He looks haunted. I shake my head and dare to pat him on the back. I know how he feels, but it isn’t his fault.
Fi soon joins us, followed by Brendan and then Marcus. We avoid looking at each other; avoid speaking, even though I know we’re all thinking the same thing.
What the fuck just happened?
Brendan breaks the silence.
“What was it?”
“What was what?” I reply, wearily.
“What… what did that?”
“I dunno. You’re supposed to be the cave ecologist. You tell me.”
When he doesn't answer, Fi takes up the slack
“What happened?” she asks, her voice low.
I grind my teeth together. What what what what what. Fuck off. Like I know.
“Something came up underneath us,” Janos says. “Something big.”
“Something alive?”
Janos just shrugs and glances to me. No point looking this way, big guy. I have no idea what it was either.
“So, we’re facing the very real possibility that there’s something large and quite possibly carnivorous living down there?” Marcus says after a long pause. “Great.”
“I don’t know.” I say. For some reason, Marcus’s attitude is making me feel angry. “No one really saw anything. For all we know, it could have been a… a rogue current, or an unforeseen outcrop of rock just below the surface.” Which has the ability to leap out of the water and chomp boats to bits.
“Oh yeah? Then where’s Nik? And while we’re at it, where’s the fucking boat?” Marcus stands up, his hands on his head. He spins on the spot. “We’re three fucking miles down, with no equipment and no way of letting those above know things have gone to shit-”
“Sit down, Marcus,” Fi says.
“I will not sit down!” Marcus snaps back. His hands come off his head and he starts throwing them around like a crazy person trying to direct imaginary traffic. “Hasn’t it occurred to you? Is this what happened to the Alpha Team? They tried to cross that damn lake and… it got them.”
“It?”
“Whatever is living in the fucking water!”
“We don’t know if there is an ‘it’ yet.”
“It is an ‘it’,” says Janos. His gaze slides from the water and settles on Fi. “Megan saw it first. Nik thought it was, you know, reflections in the water playing mind-tricks, but then something hit the boat. It knew we were coming. It knew what to do.”
“Oh, this gets better and better!” Marcus says.
“Brendan?” Fi says.
“What?”
“Like Meg said, you’re the expert. What do you think?”
Brendan looks back over the water, chewing on the side of his thumb. “I don’t know-“
“Oh, great – if you don’t know, why did you even bother coming?” Marcus starts.
“I don’t know because this whole scenario is new,” Brendan cuts in. “Not just new to me, but new in general. Underground seas are usually accessed by bore holes. You don’t tend to just stumble on them like we did. So no, I don’t have a clue what it might have been. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t like to speculate.”
“Rather than worrying about whether we can identify the inhabitants of the lake, maybe we should be thinking about finding ways back to the main shore?” Janos says.
“Oh yeah,” Marcus says. “We’ll just go and lop a few palm trees down and lash the logs together with vines – that should make a nice raft. Oh, no, wait a moment. We can’t do that because there aren’t any fucking trees down here – or indeed anything that fucking floats!”
“Marcus,” I say. “Calm down.” His theatrics are starting to give me a migraine, and the last thing I need is one of those, especially since my migraine meds are at the bottom of this godforsaken sea right now. He goes to snap at me, but I pull my best ‘teacher says shut the fuck up’ face and he rocks back a bit. I don’t use it often, but it shuts up arrogant undergrads, so why not him too?
“Best thing to do,” Fi says, trying to sound confident and assertive, “is have a look around here. See where we are. Have a look at what provisions we do have. Try to come up with some kind of strategy. Remember, once they realise they’ve lost contact with us as well, they’ll realise we’re in trouble and need help.”
“Or decide this whole endeavour was a ridiculous waste of time and forget about us,” Marcus grumbles under his breath. This time, both Janos and I shoot him stony looks. Fi carries on.
“They sent help after the Alpha Team. They’ll send help after us. Nobody gets left behind.”
Nobody gets left behind. Heh. I’m surprised Marcus didn’t kick off again at that one. That’s a military platitude, one Fi learned during her time with the US Marines. She’s a good lass – I can’t really call her a ‘girl’ since she’d probably punch me into next week if I did – with a good heart, but her military training means she tends to see things in the simplest of ways. What she tends to forget is this is not a military endeavour. I know, and judging by the looks the others are giving each other, they do too, that if a rescue mission is considered too risky (or, God forbid, too expensive), then they will leave us down here to rot.
“Hang on… what’s that?” Brendan says, breaking through my morbid train of thought. I look up and follow his line of sight.
Something pale is floating in the shallows.
We all inch to our feet. It’s bobbing in the slight current, a formless mass. My stomach sinks. I’m not running over there, and it seems like I’m not the only one having reservations. I know what it might be, and I’m not sure I’m ready to face the consequences of that right now. We’ve been sat here bickering for what? Half an hour? An hour? There’s no way he would survive being underwater that long.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll go.” Fi says. In a fit of bravado, she stomps through the shallows, sending up graceful fans of frigid water with every step. My heart jolts into my throat. For some reason, on a deep, instinctual level, I know that’s a bad idea.
Fi approaches the mass and stoops down to investigate it. My hand flies involuntarily to my mouth as I bite down on the urge to scream at her, to tell her to get the hell out of the water. Instead, I hold my breath and dare not move.
“Fucking hell…” she says as she hauls the pale thing out of the water. “Would you come and have a look at this?”
By an unspoken agreement of glances and tiny shrugs, Janos strides in after her. They have a brief conversation that I can’t quite make out before he grabs part of the… whatever it is Fi has found, and together they drag it back to shore.
I’m not sure if I’m happy or disappointed it’s not Nik. If he had drowned, then maybe we could have kept fooling ourselves that what happened was down to rogue currents and a horrible accident.
What Fi and Janos bring back is far more horrifying.
The remains of the inflatable dinghy are in tatters. Ragged ends of yellow rubber waft like entrails in the slight current. Fi lifts up a section of it and inspects it closely.
“It looks as if it has been mauled by something.”
Considering the dinghy could comfortably seat four people, we don’t have to say what we’re all think
ing. A quick glance suffices. Whatever the ‘something’ was, in order to do this much damage, it must have been pretty big.
“So…” says Marcus to Brendan. “Come on, expert. What do you reckon?”
Brendan gazes over the now-calm water, his eyes narrowed, as if trying to spot the culprit. “Like I said before, I don’t know.”
“Well, whatever it was, it left something behind,” Fi says. We all turn to watch her as she pries something out of the rubber. It’s embedded in one of the plastic paddle-mounts, but she eventually manages to lever it out with the tip of her knife.
“Jesus…” she breathes as she weighs in it the palm of her hand. “Look at the size of that…”
A tooth. But not just any old tooth. This one is about five inches long, conical, with regular striations along its length. It is pointed, vicious. At one end, pink gum still gleams wetly.
“What the fuck is that from?” Marcus asks. “A shark?”
I shake my head. I’ve found enough shark teeth in my time to know what they look like.
“No. Shark teeth are invariably triangular, with serrated edges.” I beckon to Fi, wordlessly asking if I can hold her prize. She hands it over and then unconsciously wipes her hands down her thighs, as if that might wipe away all contact with the things that caused Nik’s demise.
“It’s heavy. This thing is used to tearing into things – things that struggle.”
Like me.
I’m struggling. I’m struggling because I have seen a tooth like this before. Three years previous, Oxford Clay, Peterborough, England. Embedded in a jaw fragment. Not as big as this, but almost identical in morphology.
“Pliosaur,” Janos says quietly.
I jerk my head up. Is he reading my thoughts? His dark eyes are wide and never leave the tooth in my hand.
I nod. “That’s my thoughts too.”
“Plio-what?” Marcus asks.
“Pliosaur,” I say. I feel oddly detached from myself, as if I’m actually standing a couple of feet away, watching myself speak. “Jurassic marine predator. Nine known genera, I think, with the largest being discovered in Svalbard, although experts think the one unearthed in Dorset might be even bigger.” I swallow. “They call the Svarlbard one 'Predator X' and reckon that bastard could’ve reached sizes of up to fifty feet in length.”
Marcus snorts derisively, but Janos nods at everything I say.
“Ambush predator,” he adds, “was known for its unique method of locomotion – only the related plesiosaurs swam in a similar way - and their huge, tooth-filled skulls.”
I give Janos an enquiring look.
“Yeah, you're right. How do you know that?”
He shrugs. “Don’t all small boys like dinosaurs at some point?” He flashes me a blink-and-you’d-miss-it smile before looking serious again. “But they all died out by the end of the Cretaceous. Changing environments, competition, salinity… they died out before the K/T extinction. This cannot be.”
I test the weight of the tooth in my hand. He’s right, of course – there’s no way it could be true. Absolute nonsense to even entertain the notion. But the tooth is here. Here, in my hand. Exactly the same as the Liopleurodon tooth found in the Oxford Clay in Peterborough, only an inch and a half bigger.
“So… what you’re saying is there’s a huge fuck-off monster that should have died out what… seventy million years ago? But despite that, it's in these waters and it possibly just ate Nik?” The brutality of Marcus’s tight statement makes me wince. Just ate Nik. No attempt at sugar coating it, just bald reality. Or surrealism. Or whatever passes for reality here. I don’t know any more. “Bullshit,” Marcus says. “This is all bullshit.”
“This system has been isolated from the surface since the Jurassic period,” Brendan says. He’s looking thoughtful, and nods to me, his hand outstretched. I pass him the tooth, careful not to touch the flesh still clinging to it. For some reason, that freaks me out. The tooth on its own? I could pretend its nothing more than a fossil, a relic from a time long gone. But the flesh… the flesh tells another story. It’s fresh. It’s real. And it’s here.
“And?” Marcus says.
“Could be a case of convergent evolution,” Brendan says. “Something fitting into a niche within an environment causing them to take on a familiar form. There are creatures we call spiders living in caves that have nothing to do with the arachnid family – they’ve just evolved that form because it serves the environment the animal lives in the best way.”
I find myself nodding. “Yeah, like ichthyosaurs and dolphins,” I say. “They look really similar, exploited similar environmental riches, but were two totally disparate species – one’s a reptile, the other a mammal.”
“So… what?” asks Fi. “You’re saying whatever is in there isn’t a relic from prehistoric times?”
“Well… no,” says Brendan, looking awkward. “I’m no expert, but that’s one possible explanation. The other is that this environment was somehow protected and whilst other species died out, this one survived and has been evolving down here, apart from the rest of the natural world. It happens. Look at the Coelacanth. Thought extinct for 65 million years, then in 1938, one turns up in a fish market in Africa.”
“Yeah, but that’s just a fish.”
“A pretty big fish. I mean, big enough for the world to take notice.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t a fifty foot fucking monster, was it?” Marcus explodes. “Would you all listen to yourselves? You all sound like nutcases! Jurassic marine predators surviving to modern times… it’s like some shitty sci-fi movie they show at 3am because by then you’re too shitfaced to care about logic!”
“Okay, fine - then what do you think attacked the boat, Marcus?” Brendan asks. “And what about this?” He brandishes the tooth like the Sword of Truth.
“Fuck that!” Before any of us can stop him, Marcus lunges forwards and grabs the tooth out of Brendan’s hand. He winds his arm back and throws. The tooth spins end over end before plopping into the waters of the ancient lake.
“What the… what the hell did you do that for?” I feel rage, real, red hot rage well up within me. I’m usually pretty easy going if I do say so myself, but watching that ignorant prick hurl something so precious, so… so… unique out into the depths just because he isn’t ready to face the reality of our situation makes my blood boil. I clench my fist to stop myself from slapping him. “That was the only hard evidence of what might be living out there.”
“Boo fucking hoo,” Marcus mutters.
That’s it. I’ve had enough of him. Arrogant wanker, always trying it on, disguising his misogyny as playful banter. I take a step forward, but before I can raise a hand, I feel a gentle pressure upon my shoulder. I whip around, ready to confront whoever dares to try to stop me from sorting the arrogant little prick out, and I am faced with Janos, a small crease of concern between his eyes, shaking his head.
“What is done is done,” he says. “It is not worth it. We need to focus on what is important.”
“But he-”
“Yes, I know. But it doesn’t matter. Not now. Now, we need to work out what to do next. That is what matters.”
His voice, with that heavy almost Russian lilt of his, is quite hypnotic.
I take in a deep breath to quell the fire inside me. He’s right. What’s proof of any kind if no one gets to see it?
Marcus sneers at Janos, but is sensible enough not to say anything. Janos might be our gentle giant, but even he has limits, and this place is enough to push anyone to the very limit of theirs.
“So… what now?” Brendan asks, tentatively.
“I guess… I guess we have a look around,” says Fi. “Find out what’s here. Establish some kind of camp. See if there might be another way back to the main shore.”
Whilst I agree with everything she’s saying, I can’t help my attention from being diverted. A weird crackling sound on the edge of my hearing bugs me. It sputters in fits and starts, like a fly bang
ing against a windowpane.
“If there is, then it might be sensible to – I’m sorry, Megan, am I boring you?” Fi sounds testy, so I drag my attention back.
“No, sorry, not at all. But… can’t you hear that?”
They all fall silent for a moment, and there it is again, a weird, buzzing noise. Like… static?
“Fuck, that’s the radio!” Brendan says. He leaps forward, towards the water, yelling. “Hey! HEY! WE’RE HERE! We can’t get out! HELP!”
The water in front of him boils, as if something has just flipped over just below the surface. He steps back, away from the shallows.
“They won’t be able to hear you,” Marcus says. “Retard.”
“Don’t call him a retard,” I snap. Marcus is really getting on my tits now. I will quite happily lamp him one if he doesn’t shut the hell up sometime soon.
“He has a point,” Fi says. “You need someone to press the button to reply, remember?”
So close, yet so far. The other shore only has to be – what – fifty? Seventy five feet away? If it were a swimming pool, none of us would baulk. But it’s not a swimming pool. It’s a black stretch of freezing water of indeterminate depth with… something living in it.
Something big.
Something that, despite us being on land, hasn’t moved away in search of food elsewhere
“Fuck,” Brendan mutters. I can’t help but agree with him. Fuck indeed.
Chapter Four
I really need a cigarette. I gave up smoking eight years ago, but right now, I’d give my left tit for a ciggie. Fuck it, I’d let Marcus cop a feel of my left tit if he had one I could spark up. But he doesn’t, so I won’t. Good job, really. Not a good place to be prostituting yourself for a cigarette.
We still haven’t found any evidence of the Alpha Team. God knows what happened to them. It’s this, on top of everything else, that’s really strung everyone out.
What happened to Team Alpha?
It hangs over us like a bad smell. No one has said it. No one needs to. But, by some unspoken agreement, we all peer behind every boulder, glance up at every nook, investigate every cranny, just in case there’s something, anything, there that gives us a hint.
