Peter Benchley's Creature

by Peter Benchley

  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, 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 till 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 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 Connecticut license to drive a boat, he was underage to be alone in a motorboat, and even if he were to be let off with a warning, the news was certain to get back to his father, who would have no choice but to ground him.

  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. Not 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 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 Elizabeth were boyfriend-girlfriend feelings. He knew only that they were different from any feelings he had ever had for a girl, and that Elizabeth was different from any girl he had ever known.

  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 about Elizabeth.

  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 Elizabeth the painter.

  "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 de
liberateness 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 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," Elizabeth said, and she grinned and took Max's hand and led him up the road toward the borough. She was barefoot—she never wore shoes, at least he had never seen her in any—but she didn't flinch even on the roughest stretches of the pebbly pavement.

  The high school band was assembling in the boat-storage yard at the foot of Beach Street. Drum majorettes in sequins and spangles practiced tossing their batons in the air; trumpeters and trombonists blared cacophonous bars of nameless tunes; two boys were attempting to hoist a tuba onto the shoulders of a girl built like a linebacker; an old gray dog sat in the dirt and barked randomly.

  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 Settlers Square, from which the bishop would emerge to lead the procession through town and to the docks for the ceremonial blessing.

  Elizabeth led Max past the crowd, across the square and down Oak Street, where throngs jammed the sidewalks. Little children sat on the hoods of cars; teenagers perched in the branches of trees.

  Max stopped Elizabeth and gestured at the people and said, "We'll never see a thing."

  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. Elizabeth led Max behind the house, opened a gate into the yard and ushered him through. She pointed to a hole in the base of the fence on the far side of the yard—a big dog had probably dug it—and darted across the grass, dropped to her stomach and squeezed through the hole. Max followed her, and when he stood up on the other side of the fence, saw that they were in the courtyard of what had once been a church but was now a private house. The belfry or clock tower or whatever it had been loomed high over the roof of the house.

  Elizabeth scampered up the wide steps to the front porch and stood before the massive double door. She gestured to Max, cupping her hands in front of her and bending her knees.

  "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 an hour, until at last the stairs ended at a single door, bolted top and bottom. They slid back the bolts, Elizabeth pushed the door open and Max stepped out onto a narrow walkway.

  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 Montauk Point. In the west he could see hints of Stonington and Mystic, and in the north the ribbon of highway leading to Rhode Island.

  "Cool?" Elizabeth said.

  "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 Elizabeth was tugging at his arm. He followed her down the stairs and out of the house, boosted her up to return the key, then let her lead him through a maze of back streets and alleyways paralleling the parade route.

  As they neared the point, the noise grew louder, and the onshore breeze was laced with the aroma of frying fat.

  The town of Waterboro tapered to an end, like the tip of a pencil, in a gravel parking lot that overlooked Fishers Island Sound and was occupied, usually, by sightseers during the day and by teenaged revelers at night. Today, cars had been banned, and replaced by pickup trucks and minivans and aluminum specialty wagons purveying T-shirts, pennants, mugs, buttons, pins, posters and food . . . fried, boiled, broiled, grilled, skewered, frozen, raw and alive, served on sticks and spits, in napkins and newspapers and folds of flaky bread.

  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 Elizabeth through the crowd that waited for the parade to arrive, he was entranced, imagining that he had been transported to a Middle Eastern bazaar. Though he recognized only a fraction of the foods piled high on folding tables, and though he had eaten breakfast only a couple of hours earlier, he was tantalized by the rich, exotic aromas.

  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, Elizabeth sensed that she was alone, and she turned, retraced her steps and found Max smiling sheepishly at her as he chewed on a sausage sandwich, red grease drooling down his chin.

  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 to 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.