“Technical problem. We’re sitting on the floor at the moment. Still got power, integrity’s good. It looked li —”
Tom ducked down suddenly from a viewport, “Fuck!” Sheila looked, radio still in hand, saying nothing. She heard concern from the other end.
“—on down there? Sheila? You reading me?”
“Yeah, loud and clear. We’re all right. Hang on.”
She racked the radio. Radio radio radio.
Tom was looking at her.
“What, Tom? What is it?”
He was pointed to the port with his thumb. “I saw it out there.”
Sheila took a look. There was nothing there but her reflection on the dark glass.
“I saw it. It came right at us, then seemed to change its mind and went straight back the other way. Backwards.”
“Backwards?”
“It didn’t turn around. Came at us and went back. Fast.”
“Cameras still running?”
He checked. “Yeah.”
“Wind it back.”
She clambered into the pilot seat and hoped the engines were alright.
They weren’t.
“Shit. Call it in.”
Tom took off his cap and swept his hair back as he muttered something. He took up the radio.
“Stan?” Tom said.
“What happened?”
“We’re not sure. Something down here, we think. We only got a glimpse of it.”
“Got it on film?”
Sheila smiled. Good ole Stan.
“Yeah,” said Tom. “Got it on film. The first time, anyway.”
Sheila took the radio. “Tom says he saw it again.”
“What was it?”
“Don’t know.”
She heard some of Stan’s sigh when he came back saying, “What did it look like?”
“A blur,” she said. “A dark blur. With some blurry things that might, might, have been tentacles. Doesn’t look like any cephalopod I’ve ever seen, though.”
In the following silence she imagined the team talking about it topside. She and Tom merely exchanged glances. Eventually, when Stan came back, he had nothing to say on that subject.
“How are you?”
“Bit battered and bruised.”
But she’d felt that way for months: it wasn’t anything she wasn’t used to.
“All right. Well, bring her up when you’re ready. We’ll be waiting.”
“Roger that.”
Surfacing the Nautilus was as simple as descending. They were heavy, over forty thousand pounds of metal, so all they had to do was sink to get down, flooding the ballast tanks and descending in a cloud of bubbles. Once gravity had done its job, expendable steel weights were released to rise up again. They were not stuck on the ocean floor, they could ascend whenever they wanted, but Sheila wasn’t sure she wanted to just yet.
She shelved the radio and looked out of the nearest viewport, wondering if what was out there waited too. All she could see was the dark ocean behind her pale reflection.
***
Stan fussed with Sheila’s hair, brushing it back, arranging it neatly, and he moistened her dry lips with fingertips of water from a nearby jug.
“Let’s keep you looking pretty,” he said softly. “All these attractive doctors around. You never know. Plus Tom likes you, of course.”
Her breath wheezed, regulated by the machine that inflated and deflated beside her.
“Wake up,” he said. “Please wake up.”
She didn’t.
“Come on Sheila, you’re my best diver. The Science Foundation think they own it, and, okay, they paid for it, but the Nautilus is yours really. I need you.”
He’d made plenty of jokes about women drivers in the past but he didn’t do that now. He dare not, in case the doctors were right and she could hear him.
“How am I going to blow Attenborough out of the water with you in here, eh?” He surprised himself into a short laugh. “Out of the water. I’ll have to remember that for later. Maybe use it for the promotional stuff, what do you think?”
Assisted by her machines, Sheila breathed.
“I thought we might set lots of the footage to music. You know, let the images speak for themselves. If we do use any voiceover, though, I want your voice, okay? And you can’t do that here. So that’s the deal—get better, get the voice-over gig.”
He dabbed more water, this time cleaning away some blood that had crusted near her eye.
“Just wake up, and everything will be all right.”
But looking at her in her hospital bed, under the unforgiving glare of the fluorescent lights, he wasn’t so sure.
***
“Tom?”
His face was pressed to the glass but he’d reported nothing.
“Tom? What are you thinking?”
“You know, there’s meant to be giant squid, massive squid, that nobody’s ever seen.”
“Yeah.” She watched him. “Is that what you think hit us?”
He shrugged.
“They’ve only ever found pieces of them in fishing nets or dead bits washed up on the shore,” Sheila said. “Nobody’s actually seen one.”
Tom looked at her. “Nobody’s filmed one,” he said.
“You want to stick around for a bit. See if it comes back.”
He nodded, though it hadn’t been a question.
Sheila joined him at the view port but saw only the muted glow of blue white light and a sea floor tracked with urchin trails.
“Sometimes they find sucker marks on whales,” Sheila said. “Big marks.”
Tom let out a shaky laugh. “It tries to eat whales?”
“More like the other way around, probably.”
They waited.
“Maybe we did hit something,” Sheila said eventually. “Something drifting.”
“Then where is it now?”
Sheila thumbed the cameras in the direction of the Mariana Trench. It lay ten metres to the right of them, a gaping gash of dark in dark. “Down there?”
“But I saw it. It came back. It wasn’t something drifting.”
She didn’t know him well enough to doubt him, but she didn’t know him well enough to trust him either.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s try something.”
She toggled the switches for the lights, strobing the darkness outside. Instead of seeing nothing at all they saw glimpses of nothing.
“What are you doing?”
“Bioluminescence. Some animals use it to see.”
“Yeah,” said Tom, “like underwater headlights.”
“That’s right. Others use it —”
“As a lure. To attract prey.”
“Exactly.”
“Except we’re not exactly in a position to eat it, are we. I mean, it’ll think we’re the ones worth eating.”
“Well unless it has a tin opener . . .”
She continued to stare out into the ocean.
“Coelacanths were believed extinct,” she said eventually, “for more than 65 million years. And then, in the thirties, one was caught off the east coast of Africa. Oldest living jawed fish ever.”
“It wasn’t a coelacanth out there.”
She laughed. “No. But maybe it’s something else that managed to swim beyond its own extinction.”
***
A doctor came in to check on Sheila and saw Stan with her.
“Are you her father?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Stan, fearing he’d be thrown out otherwise. He stood up to give the man room. “How is she?”
“Well she’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said, checking her over, “and she came dangerously close to drowning. But it’s the head wound I’m concerned about.”
“Concerned?”
The doctor held up a hand while he finished his examination, then said, “I’ll show you the scan if you can just wait a moment.”
“Thank you.”
When the doctor had gone,
Stan took Sheila’s hand again and said, “I’m so sorry.” He sat down. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“Told her what?”
Mark stood in the doorway. His shirt was untucked, his shoes untied. Without waiting for an answer to his first question, he asked, “How is she?” and came in. He examined her charts, as if he was a fucking medical expert all of a sudden.
“What are you doing here?” Stan asked, standing. “You shouldn’t be here. Get out of here!”
“I’m still her emergency contact,” Mark said. “What are you doing here?”
But Mark didn’t really care for an answer, or need one—he’d made his point with the question. Now he stood looking at Sheila like he’d discovered a new species. Stan suddenly hated the man. He’d always thought him an arrogant arsehole, and the way he’d treated Sheila had been appalling, but he’d remained professional about their working relationship. He thoroughly regretted that now.
“I just wanted her back on the team,” Stan said. “I’d never have lured her onboard if she’d known you were back for another series.”
Mark nodded. “Well she knows now.”
Sheila’s breath huffed and wheezed.
***
“Just come back,” Stan said. He was clearly worried. “You’re dead in the water with no option but to surface, and you’re too bloody close to the trench for my liking.”
“We’re alright,” Sheila said, “and apart from that one time, which might have been an accident, it hasn’t made contact again. It’s just checking us out.”
“Sorry, no. Come back.”
He sounded like Mark. Men often said sorry when they weren’t. Or if they were sorry, it was for something different to what they were actually apologising for. Sorry I got caught. Sorry I married you.
“We’ll get the tub fixed and you can go back down and look around for it then—white light, blue, red, whatever you want,” Stan said. “Disco ball, if you want to.”
Sheila’s idea was to switch to red light but strobe with one of the lights on the arms extended out and away from them. Most fish can’t see red light. She hoped it would come closer, attracted to the smaller light, without seeing them watching. It was a tactic some other sea creatures used, lighting the water around them with red bioluminescence to see by while attracting prey with blue.
Tom took the radio. Coming to her rescue, her knight in sweaty vest. “Give us another hour, Stan.”
But Sheila snatched the radio back and racked it without waiting for a reply.
“Why didn’t you just tell him we were breaking up?” Tom said.
She ignored him, extending the Nautilus arm. She flipped their lights to red and the water they sat in seemed tinted with blood.
“What are you doing?”
She set one of the arm lights flashing.
It came at them right away. Like a living torpedo, it sped at them from above with a trail of limbs tangling behind in streamlined perfection. A dark mass, not much more than a blur, it was surprisingly bulbous and solid for such depths. It did look a bit like a squid, but it wasn’t a squid, it was too squat at one end, almost spherical. Before getting too close, it came to an abrupt stop and the tentacles behind swept forward, like a tangled mane of hair. Then the shape travelled back and up and away from them again, an ugly ball of flesh. The mass of tentacles were swept into a streamlined point as they diminished, disappearing into the darkness of the sea. A comet, pulling its tail behind.
“Fast fucker,” said Tom.
“Did you see its eyes?”
“No, did you? Shit, did you? What were they like?”
“I didn’t see them either. Maybe it doesn’t have any. It’s dark down here, so what’s the point? Lots of fish rely on sensing movement.”
Outside the Pacific was flushed red but empty. The two of them waited.
“You remember that seal I mentioned?” Tom asked.
“You think we’re being toyed with?”
Tom’s silence was answer enough.
“It only came for us that first time because we were moving,” Sheila said. “The second time it was probably just coming to where it felt us last.”
Tom accepted her explanation with a nod. “Then you extended the arm and flashed the light . . .”
“ . . . except it wasn’t the light, it was . . . ”
“ . . . the movement that attracted it.”
“Bingo.”
It was a definite possibility. Another one was that it had tasted them. Taste in water was like smell in air. She had no idea what a forty-thousand-pound tub of metal might taste like. Strange, she was guessing.
Tom turned to grab his water bottle and caught a glance outside. “Look.”
Sheila saw.
“That’s not the same creature.”
“No.”
It passed them low to the floor, moving slowly up the length of the ocean trench beside them. It was like an eel, only much bigger. Thanks to known distances between landmark fissures and sea floor geography, Sheila was able to estimate its size.
“Sixteen metres.”
It turned and came back.
“Look at the lights.”
Like many sea creatures, this one had photofores—cells that produced light cells. Some used them to match the coloration of the water they occupied, but this deep, in the dark, there was no need—this one seemed to use them like headlights. Or maybe to attract prey.
“What’s it doing?”
Good question; a creature this deep wouldn’t waste energy if it could help it.
“Come on, Tom, calm down,” she said. “It’s not like we’re in any danger.”
“Then why are we whispering?”
Sheila was baffled. Something this big, this deep, was strange because there was nothing suitable to feed it down here. Although this was the second creature of size they’d seen now, so clearly there was something to eat. She watched as it swam away parallel to the trench.
Tom said, “I think we just buried The Blue Planet.”
Sheila nodded. “I think we did, yeah.”
Tom handed her the radio. “Call it in.”
She nodded. She told Stan, “You are going to love what’s going on down here.”
“What? What is it?” The tinny sound of his voice only made him sound more excited.
Tom, behind her, called it the lesser-spotted-giant-fuck-knows-what and she laughed. “Really,” she said, “This is big.”
There was nothing back from up top for a moment.
“You get that, Stan? It’s beautiful.”
The transponder clicked and she heard Stan take a breath to speak, then it went silent again. When it clicked ready for broadcast a second time Sheila heard the tail end of someone saying something angry behind Stan’s voice, but he ignored it and so she did too
“Come back, Sheila.”
Sheila frowned. “What?”
“Er, Sheila?” said Tom, “Something weird’s happening.”
Outside, the creature was winding around itself in tight spirals.
Sheila hung up on Stan. “What’s got it so agitated?”
“Look at it go!”
They looked up at the roof but the viewport there offered a very limited view and they saw nothing. Sheila went to another, squatting down as low as she could in order to look up.
Tom repositioned the camera and flooded the area with light. They caught the dark squid shape in a hasty retreat, the other—fish? snake?—following fast.
“Not fast enough,” said Sheila.
Having spent a great deal of energy, the creature let itself fall gently to the ocean floor where it proceeded to glide lengths again, fins rippling to propel itself above a cloud of sand much as before, except now it was to the left of them. It seemed to grow as it neared, swelling in size until it was so close that they couldn’t see it all at once anymore, just the flash of silver as it passed them by, like a train rushing past those waiting at a station.
“It
’s too close,” Tom said.
“Yeah. We can’t get it all on camera.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I’ll take us up a little, get a different perspective.”
“That squid thing’s still out there too, remember.” He turned his cap around so the peak pointed backwards and pressed his face as close to the glass as he could get it, looking up and down and left and right.
The Nautilus began to rise.
“Stop,” said Tom.
“Why?”
“Stop! Look at it. It’s winding around again.”
But Sheila had seen something else, something new, from a different viewport.
The ocean floor trembled. Sand shifted and swirled, shaken away from the body of something rising, something huge, something shaped like a manta ray but as flat as a monkfish.
“Tom.”
The creature shook the camouflage from itself with fins the size of ice rinks as it rose from the seabed, the pigments in its skin changing colour to match its new surroundings. There were no eyes that she could see, but antennae-like protrusions sprouted like hair from various parts. It came up slowly, and in her peripheral vision Sheila saw something else come down fast. She knew at once what was happening; the squid thing was back, rocketing down and dragging its tendrils behind, speeding back again the way it had come, and this time Sheila saw the rod of flesh connecting it to the shape lifting itself from hiding.
It was a lure.
“There it goes!” Tom yelled, still watching the other creature, and sure enough Sheila saw it chase the receding bait. A silver spear flashing in the lights of the Nautilus, unaware that it was not the predator but the prey.
“Tom!”
He looked at her, then at what she saw.
“Oh shit.”
Still rising from the ocean floor, the creature’s maw dropped open, a vast ramp of a mouth with curved spurs for teeth. The new space it had created in opening its jaws filled instantly with water and suddenly everything happened very fast. The submersible turned in an unexpected current before the mouth snapped closed—quickly, so quickly—and Sheila wondered about the mechanism needed to expel water so fast, and how did it move so fast, and, fuck, how was it so big down here? She didn’t see whether it caught its dinner because some part of it struck them as it came up and then they were rolling, they were upside down, the floor was above instead of below, and she was hitting Tom, hitting monitors, hitting panels and walls and hurting herself as outside forces tossed her around. Something struck them, once, twice, a flurry of strikes, and then they were not only turning and spinning and rolling but falling, down, down, further than should have been possible, down into the dark.
For The Night Is Dark Page 30
