What Lurks Beneath

by Ryan Lockwood

  “What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me—”

  “I’m not even supposed to be talking to you now. That’s all I can tell you. I gotta go.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re gonna tell me, you prick? What was it? What did she see?”

  “That’s all I know. One other thing. Do a Google search about a sea monster attacking a yacht in the Bahamas. Something happened last week.”

  There was a click, and Wits was gone.

  CHAPTER 37

  Val toweled off her hair in the bow of the boat. She felt relaxed, relieved, her wet suit stripped to her waist and the sun warming her back while the craft bobbed gently on small waves. She now understood why nobody entered the hole below them. There had been a few long moments where she’d been worried they wouldn’t make it back.

  She’d left Mack when she spied something shiny beneath her—what looked like something artificial. She decided to hurry down to it, only to find it was an old beer can carelessly dropped from the surface by some tourist. As she’d begun her ascent, and was almost to her uncle, a billowing cloud of cold, sediment-laden water had overtaken them, washed up from below as it was expelled from the caverns woven under Andros Island.

  With the visibility suddenly at zero, and a swirling, turbid current forcing them up too fast, she and Mack had held on to one another and tried to control their ascent without slamming their heads into the rock wall that curved in over the shaft’s opening. After several hair-raising minutes, they’d cleared the mouth of the hole and calmed down as they hovered in the warmer, clear waters beneath the boat. Needing to clear the excess nitrogen from their bodies, they remained for some time there, watching the sediment cloud haze the waters around them.

  “I guess all that rain last week musta gotten under the island,” Mack said. He hadn’t bothered drying off, and was leaning back in the captain’s chair.

  Val thought again of the dark cloud of cold water rising toward her and shuddered. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  She sat down on a padded bench seat to put on dry clothes. Eric was in the stern, in the filtered shade under the black mesh strung over the top rails, setting his laptop up to play back the ROV’s video footage. Mack stood, a wooden toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth, and moved over to Eric. Val buttoned shorts over her swim bottoms and got up to join them.

  “You were right, Val,” Eric said, the hint of a smile on his face. “These holes not only suck. Now we’re seeing them blow.”

  “Like you,” Mack said.

  Val shook her head. Was he hard on Eric just because he’d never served in the military? Her Uncle Mack had always been confrontational, but now he’d become a bully. She wished this fieldwork could be more light-hearted. Suddenly she had a flashback:

  Almost two years ago. Will Sturman. With his friend, Mike Phan, arguing and telling lewd jokes. Off Southern California, on Maria, named after the wife he’d lost. Him looking at her, the way he used to.

  Will had been a drunk then, before he’d gone clean with her. He was trying to get clean again now, and maybe he would. But he’d never move on from Maria. She looked at Eric.

  “Got anything yet?”

  He looked down at the computer. “Almost . . . Okay, there. The raw download’s ready. Might be hard to see, out here in the sun. Someone hold up a towel.”

  As they’d boarded the boat, he’d informed them that the hole indeed dropped to more than 350 feet below the seabed, but how far he wasn’t sure. DORA had never reached a discernible bottom, so they would need to view the 3-D scan to determine actual depth. And he’d excitedly described some interesting features DORA had encountered. Some sort of what he considered man-made debris piles outside a few side tunnels, and larger, club-like objects just inside one passage. All now captured on video.

  She and Mack crowded in on either side of him on the seat, squinting to see even under the towel they held over them.

  “There isn’t much worth watching in the beginning,” Eric said. “I’m going to fast forward until DORA is farther down . . . here . . . no, hang on, I passed it.” He messed with the display. “I’m bringing us to where the hole first narrowed to a series of ledges.”

  He played with the feed some more, and then on the screen was a lighter-colored shape, surrounded by a darker background. “Here. This is where I recorded that first weird pile of rocks or something, by the mouth of a side tunnel.”

  Val leaned toward the monitor. “Can you turn up the brightness?”

  “This is the best we’re gonna get. Mack, move that towel over the screen.”

  He did, and suddenly the playback was a little more discernible. In the paused video, DORA’s lights were fixed on a pile of rubble. It was located on a relatively flat surface, with the black opening of another branching fissure behind it.

  “Where is that?” Mack asked.

  “About three-hundred-twenty feet down. This is where the shaft clearly narrowed, starting with a wide ledge on one side. It looked like a bulldozer had excavated the tunnel here, so I took DORA just past this pile, into it.”

  He played the video feed again, and bits of marine snow moved upward on the camera, and Val realized she was seeing the first hint that the upward flow of cold water was about to begin.

  “There.” Eric again paused the image and pointed. “There’s one of the clubs.”

  “Looks like a big tooth or something,” Mack said.

  “I doubt it,” Val said. On the screen was an elongated object with a heavier mass on one end, more pointed on the other. Something about it was familiar. “It’s hard to tell with it half-buried in the sediment like that. But I’d guess it’s probably some sort of bone. Maybe from a whale.”

  “How the hell would a whale bone get back into that narrow cavern?”

  “Good question. I don’t know.” Val thought for a moment. “Maybe the same currents that pushed the rubble out brought the bone back in. Let’s send some stills of this footage to Karen.”

  “Back at PLARG?” Mack asked.

  She nodded. “She studies marine mammals. Maybe she’ll be able to ID this.”

  “I found a bone too,” Mack said. “Smaller than that one. I dropped the damn thing when that sediment kicked up. You saw it, Val.”

  “I couldn’t tell what was sinking toward me. But I’m not surprised we’re finding bones. With the lower oxygen levels in these holes, bones and other matter might preserve longer than they would elsewhere in the ocean.”

  Eric fast-forwarded. “There.” He paused the video. “Here’s the other pile. The bigger one. Maybe forty feet deeper.”

  It was indeed another mound of debris, perhaps five or ten feet high, also located just below an opening in the rock wall. She scanned the image. There appeared to be the skeletal remains of sizeable arthropods, and maybe a few large bones jutting from the pile.

  “What do you think these are, Val?” Eric asked.

  “Well, they could be debris cones, from the collapse of the rock above.”

  “Like the pile of snow that forms when you shovel off a deck?”

  She nodded.

  “DORA found something like this in Mexico’s cenotes,” he said. “But here they’re at the mouths of tunnels.”

  She said, “What do you think, Mack?”

  He shrugged. “Debris cones seem plausible. Or maybe like you said, the currents piled that stuff there over time.”

  “Maybe.” She frowned.

  “What?” Mack said.

  “Well, with the bones, the shells . . . they sort of remind me of something else.” She watched as the dense cloud of sediment finally overtook the ROV and obscured the camera, effectively ending the video. Eric stopped it.

  He looked at her. “What? What do those remind you of?”

  “Well, it really isn’t possible. They’re far too large. But they look like middens.”

  “Middens?”

  “Yes. Middens.”

  “What the hell are those?” Mack asked.r />
  “Basically they’re trash heaps, usually composed of bits of rock or coral, and shells . . . or bones.”

  “Made by what?”

  Val got up and moved to the edge of the boat. She leaned over the side, gazed down into the water. The dark hole beneath the surface remained obscured by the cloudy water.

  “Nothing that gets big enough to do that,” she said.

  CHAPTER 38

  Passing by the last vacant lifeguard tower was like passing some invisible line drawn in the white sand of the beach. The bright lights of the resort were quickly replaced by dim starlight and the faint glow of a crescent moon. The loud music behind them soon faded into the quiet, rhythmic sound of waves lapping the shore, and a gentle breeze coming off the dark ocean brought the smell of salt. Gloria finally began to relax.

  With the back of one hand, she wiped a drying tear from her check. As they continued down the beach, she looked at Beth. She could barely see her partner’s short-haired silhouette in the dim light, but her hand was warm in her own. No, not my partner, Gloria reminded herself. She’s now my wife.

  She smiled for a moment at the realization, which still hadn’t fully sunk in, but then the smile faded, and she felt the lump rise in her throat again. Even if they were legally married now, much would never change.

  Four days ago, back in Delaware, Gloria had married her partner of eight years at a small ceremony attended by close friends and a few accepting family members. Until a few years ago, gay marriage hadn’t even been legal in the state. But it hadn’t mattered anyway. Beth had been deployed overseas until just last year.

  She was everything Gloria wasn’t. While Gloria was loud, outgoing, all bulging breasts and bright-red lipstick, bangled in beaded jewelry, her longtime partner was ever the soldier: tough, stoic, and determined, with short hair and angular features. They were so different. But they worked.

  Back at the resort, when the young men had made the first “lesbo” comments as the late-night party had started to break up, even Beth had at first shrugged it off. They were used to not being accepted. But then the one really drunk asshole, who’d continued to needle them in a heavy Boston accent, had made a lewd comment about Gloria (I don’t blame you, he’d said to Beth. I’d totally bang her.). Gloria had thought for a few tense moments Beth was actually going to get into a fight.

  Gloria stopped walking. Looked back again.

  “Don’t worry,” Beth said. “They didn’t follow us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. We’re alone.” She squeezed Gloria’s hand.

  They continued down the ribbon of smooth, densely packed sand. A woman working at the hotel had told her that the beach was made up of tiny shell fragments and bits of the island’s limestone. In the weak moonlight, Gloria could see where just offshore the sandy bottom yielded to darker sea grass beds on the bottom.

  The beach and the water were warmer than she’d hoped for, having read that it could be cool here in February. But the night was pleasant, and the clean water that washed over her feet was cool and soothing. She let go of Beth’s hand and touched the ring on her left hand. It was so real. She felt a surge of emotion, and stopped to wrap her arms around Beth’s neck and kiss her.

  “What was that for?” Beth asked.

  But Gloria didn’t answer. Instead, she kissed her again, this time with her tongue. Beth began to kiss her back, and slid one hand down to her crotch.

  “Not here,” Gloria whispered.

  “Why not?” Beth smiled. “That’s what honeymoons are for, right?” Her hands ran over Gloria’s body.

  Beth started to lead her up the beach, toward a low rock outcrop. They dropped their sandals in the sand, and Gloria took a final look back down the strand toward the resort. Nobody in sight. She felt Beth’s strong hands sliding up her thighs. She looked down the beach, in the other direction—

  “Wait, honey.”

  “What,” Beth asked breathlessly. “Is everything okay?”

  “What’s that smell? It’s awful.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think I see something. Farther up the beach.” Gloria pointed.

  There, in the surf a short distance away, a wave washed against a long, dark blob. It wasn’t moving.

  “What is that?” Gloria clung to Beth’s arm.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Moving silently through the dark water, she sensed a change in the water. A taste. She slowed, testing the currents.

  Prey.

  She had been unwilling to venture into the abyss. The terrifying vibrations were constant, the sounds of her one enemy pulsing from points everywhere, and if she descended the vibrations brought pain. So she had hunted higher up, just below the reef crest, for the early part of the night. Prowling the offshore depths near her new den, moving in a large circle.

  But she had been unsuccessful. Returning to the den now, from a different direction, she pulsed through the water in slow, powerful bursts. As she had moved along the rim of the mile-high escarpment soaring above the undersea canyon, still seeking food, her impulse to hunt had been overcome. By an urge to return to her nearby lair, to continue clearing it, arranging it. The urge to feed had faded.

  Until now.

  She pulled herself over the top of the steep wall, dislodging a hunk of coral that sank past her into the darkness. Moving over the deep reef, she passed through a groove in the reef crest, feeling the waves crashing into the shallow ridge above, and paused. These shallows were not her usual habitat. But the taste of flesh was strong. She entered the lagoon.

  In the shallow water, her eyes began to make out a pale, sandy bottom broken by dark coral and, closer to shore, beds of sea grass. The taste grew stronger.

  Rarely had she ever ventured into shallow lagoons such as these. And never recently. But there was something here, now, closer to the shore.

  A surge of water ran past her and the sensation became more distinct. She slowed. In the water, the scent was suddenly very strong. Sour. The smell only emitted by carrion.

  She was not always a scavenger. Like her smaller cousins, she was designed to capture living prey, subdue it. Her organs were not best suited to digesting decomposing flesh, or deal with microorganisms amassing within it. But to accommodate such a large size at maturity, her kind had evolved to become highly opportunistic.

  She continued forward into the sandy flats.

  The bottom sloped steadily upward, and soon it was no longer deep enough for her to move freely. Small schools of fish in her path darted away from her shadow. But they were of no interest to her. Flattening her body, she slid her great form along the bottom, her mantle only feet below the surface now, the motion of the waves above caressing her skin. As one long arm groped along the bottom, she suddenly sensed something else.

  Vibrations. Slow, rhythmic. Faint. But they were there.

  Then, in the water, she began to taste something else. Something alive.

  It was not something on which she often fed, but it was familiar. She had fed on this prey recently. Further flattening her immense, muscular body against the sandy bottom, until her entire body was no thicker than one of her arms, she slithered forward. The vibrations grew louder. Off to one side.

  She turned, and dragged herself into the surf. Toward the vibrations.

  To intercept whatever was making them.

  The dark spot in the surf was a dead whale. At least, Gloria thought it was dead. In the water near her, it wasn’t moving, and the stench . . . just awful. It was definitely too big, too dark to be a dolphin. Even if it was the smallest whale she had ever seen. She looked down the beach, toward the three other dark shapes they had now spotted.

  “Do you think they’re all dead?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know about the others,” Beth said. “But the smell . . . I doubt they stink like this when they’re alive.”

  “What do you think killed them?”r />
  “I have no idea.”

  Gloria suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to leave the whale. To get out of the water. “We should go back. Maybe somebody at the resort will know what to do.”

  “What’s the point, babe? Even if a few of them aren’t dead yet, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “How do you know? Maybe we can help them.”

  Beth looked back toward the lit towers of the hotel, which rose defiantly into the night sky. They were a good ten-minute walk away. She looked back at Gloria.

  “Please?” Gloria said.

  Beth sighed. “All right. But hang on.”

  She waded farther into the water, now up to her thighs. She leaned down toward the front end of the motionless animal. Poked it with her hand. “It’s cold,” she said.

  “Be careful,” Gloria said. She moved deeper, next to Beth. She thought she felt something lightly brush her calf.

  “I am being careful. There’s nothing a dead—”

  Gloria suddenly felt herself plunging downward, into the water. Her face went under. She instinctively struggled to stand, to raise her head above the water. She pushed off the bottom, feeling soft sand against her hands and knees. And she felt something else, and she knew.

  Something was holding on to her. Wrapping itself tightly around her ankle.

  Desperately, she forced her face out of the water. Looked at Beth, who was splashing toward her, wide-eyed in horror.

  The thing encasing her ankle squeezed. Hard.

  “Beth,” she gasped.

  The last thing she saw was her lover reaching for her. Then she was jerked violently under.

  Her chemical receptors tested the writhing creature. Tasted it.

  Food.

  The desperate prey writhed in the organism’s grasp as she dragged it along the bottom, methodically coiling more of her arm around the flailing appendages. She was dimly aware that one of her other arms was trailing the other small creature now clumsily splashing away, toward the beach, but her focus quickly returned to the prize already wriggling in her clutches. She rolled another arm out to further ensnare the creature to ensure that it would not escape. Two other arms snaked hungrily into the surf line and wrapped themselves around the dead whale, and began to drag it into the lagoon.