Peter Benchley's Creature

by Peter Benchley

  "Jesus Christ," he said. "That's not Tall."

  49

  IT had been wounded, it could tell from the burning sensations in the flesh of its face, from the fact that one of its legs was responding slowly to signals from its brain, and from a numbness in one of its hands. It looked at the hand and saw that a finger was hanging by strands of sinew. It tugged at the finger until the sinews snapped, then it cast the finger away and scooped up mud, which it packed around the bleeding stump.

  It did not feel weakened by the wounds, it felt strengthened, invigorated by an elation born of triumph. It had met an enemy worthy of it—not merely prey but an adversary—and had conquered it.

  Its wounds were nothing; it would survive and recover.

  It no longer perceived the need for defense, no longer felt caution, for from somewhere deep within itself had come a conviction that it was now invincible.

  It saw a light in the distance, at the end of this sloping ground. Light meant shelter, and perhaps more opportunities to destroy more enemies.

  Leaning into the hill, it dragged its sluggish leg up the slope—moving slowly, veering this way and that, not concerned with time. Time meant nothing to it; it was immortal.

  50

  "WHY can't we just run?" asked Max. He was pale and fidgety, and he seemed about to cry. "It can't catch all of us, not if we spread out."

  "No, Max," Chase said, putting one arm around his son, the other around Elizabeth, who trembled slightly but seemed impassive, as if prepared to accept whatever would happen. "I don't want it to catch any of us, especially not you two."

  He went to the window, shaded his eyes and peered out into the darkness. He could see the thing more clearly now, a ghostly shape against the black. How much time did they have? Chase couldn't tell, for the thing was moving slowly, veering left and right, almost aimlessly . . . almost, but not quite, for with every brief tack it advanced a few feet closer to the house.

  "Let's do it," he said. He turned to Amanda. "Are you sure you've got the sequence down?"

  "Positive. But I still—"

  "Good." Chase took the children's hands and led them to a small closet behind the decompression chamber. "It'll be dark," he said, "but you can handle that, right? Amanda'll be with you."

  Tentatively, the children nodded, and stepped into the closet.

  Chase held his hand out to Amanda, moved close to her and whispered, "If anything goes wrong—anything—take the kids and head for the Mako. You should have plenty of time; the least I can do is stall the goddamn thing."

  "Simon . . ."

  Impulsively, Chase kissed her. "In you go," he said, and he ushered her into the closet and closed the door.

  He went to the control panel on the wall, pushed the master button that activated the decompression chamber. There was a hum as the machinery engaged, and a hiss as the pressure tanks buried in the walls began to fill. He turned the lights out in the room, all except the pressure-shielded pink bulb inside the chamber.

  Then he climbed through the hatch and crouched down, waiting.

  51

  IT was closer now, it could see movement in the house, dark figures against the light that shone through the windows. It was neither wary nor alarmed, but challenged. They might see it, they might not, but they could not stop it.

  Then the light was gone, vanished as if sucked up by the night.

  It halted, to assess the change, to reassure itself that the failure was not in itself.

  No, it could see forms—the dark lump of the house against the black slate of the sky. As its eyes adjusted to the darkness, it even saw a faint pink glow from somewhere inside the house.

  It resumed its march, and soon it was by the side of the building. It circled slowly, deliberately, seeking entry.

  It found a door, a thin thing of wood and glass, and drew back an arm to destroy it.

  52

  OVER the hum of the machinery, Chase heard glass breaking and wood splintering, then a low, guttural sound.

  It crossed the threshold into the large room, focusing on the faint pink glow.

  It heard machine sounds, and saw a big rigid object in the center of the room. The glow came from inside it. It shuffled over to the object, moved to the end where a round door hung open and bent down.

  In the dim light, it saw at the far end of the object a human, like the one it had recently vanquished, but slighter, weaker, frightened.

  Prey. Easy prey.

  It stepped inside.

  Chase smelled sourness and salt and rot, heard a footfall on the steel.

  He didn't dare look down, didn't dare make any movement that would alter his reflection in the mirror.

  The thing passed him, and now he could see the hairless ivory flesh of its legs and buttocks, the webbing between its toes, the curved steel claws clotted with blood.

  Chase's legs began to cramp. He willed himself not to move, and begged the thing to keep going. Two more steps, he thought, just two more, then he could . . .

  The thing stopped.

  It was confused, something was wrong. The human was there and then not there, and it saw something else, something it did not recognize.

  Suddenly it knew. It was seeing itself.

  With a roar of rage, it turned.

  53

  CHASE heaved himself off the floor of the chamber and dove through the open hatch. He landed on his knees, turned and reached for the chamber door. It was heavy, heavier than he had remembered.

  The creature took a step toward him, and lunged.

  Chase swung the door and leaned against it. He saw a hand reaching for him, growing larger and larger.

  The door slammed with a resonant clang.

  "Now!" Chase shouted. "Now!" He spun the dogging wheel, and a red light blinked on, signaling that the seal was complete. He felt thumping against the steel door.

  He heard the closet door open, and Amanda's footsteps as she hurried to the control panel. He had preset the dials; all she had to do was push the buttons.

  There was a sound of compressed air rushing into the chamber through a dozen vents. Cold and dry, when it collided with the warm air already in the chamber, it became fog.

  "Take it down," Chase said to Amanda, "as far and as fast as you can." He moved around to the side of the chamber and looked through the porthole.

  It had abandoned the unyielding steel door, sensing that it had been trapped, searching for an escape. It saw a hole covered with glass, and drew back a fist to smash the glass.

  Pain suddenly assaulted its head, pain such as it had never known, like fire, as if its brain were being crushed into a molten mass.

  It pressed its hands to the sides of its head and shrieked.

  Though they could see little through the fog swirling in the chamber, they heard the sound ... a piercing yowl of an animal in agony.

  "Its ears are going!" Chase said.

  "No wonder," said Amanda. "I've pressurized the chamber to two hundred feet in five seconds; its ears can't equalize fast enough. It's gotta be hurting something fierce."

  The shrieking stopped.

  "Its eardrums must've busted," said Chase.

  "Which means the pain's gone; it's deaf but it's equalized." Amanda looked at the gauge on the.control panel.

  Something slammed against the porthole. Tiny spi-derweb cracks appeared in the glass.

  "Hurry," Chase said. "Christ... it wants to break that porthole, and if it does, the chamber'll go off like a bomb." He turned to Max and Elizabeth, who stood beside Amanda. "Go outside," he said. "Fast."

  "But. . ." Max seemed perplexed. "Go where?"

  "Anywhere . . . just go!"

  The children ran toward the kitchen door. "It's at three hundred feet," Amanda said.

  As quickly as it had come, the pain had vanished, and now the creature perceived only a dullness in its head.

  Though it could not know what was happening to it, it could identify the cause of its pain: the human staring at
it through the glass. Its focus changed; no longer concerned with survival, now it sought vengeance.

  One of its feet struck something hard. It bent down, picked up the thing, hefted it and lunged at the glass circle.

  "It's got a wrench!" Chase shouted, recoiling as the heavy head of the steel tool crashed into the porthole. New cracks appeared in the glass.

  "Six hundred feet," Amanda said. "Six-fifty."

  "We've gotta do it, we've gotta do it now."

  "But we don't know—"

  "It'll work," Chase said. "It's got to." He pressed his face to the porthole and strained to see through the fog. He saw the creature crouched, its arm cocked, the wrench held in its hand like a club. "Do it!" he shouted.

  "Coming up," Amanda said, and she pushed a series of buttons. There was a deafening rushing noise, and the fog in the chamber swirled violently and began to dissipate.

  Chase saw the creature tense, saw through the gray fog the white of its eyes and the silver gleam of its teeth.

  It sprang at the porthole.

  54

  THE creature seemed to stop in midair, as if struck by a bolt of lightning. Its body contorted, its eyes popped wide, it collapsed to the floor of the chamber and clawed at its own flesh.

  "Five hundred feet . . ." Amanda said. "Four-fifty . . ."

  "It's working," said Chase. He couldn't take his eyes from the porthole. "My God . . ."

  With the chamber pressurized to six hundred and fifty feet, the squeeze on the creature—on its sinuses and lungs, on its stomach cavity and every other pocket in its body that contained air—had been nearly three hundred pounds per square inch. Now, as Amanda brought the chamber back to surface pressure, the air within the creature was escaping with the speed and violence of a balloon bursting.

  It could not see, it could not hear, it could not breathe. Every joint and sinew felt aflame. Its stomach seemed to want to invade its chest, its chest to swell into its head, its head to fly to pieces.

  It had no conception of what was happening, could not know that the air inside it was decompressing at a rate far faster than its body could accommodate, that bubbles of nitrogen were scattering throughout its tissues, lodging everywhere and growing inexorably, tearing the tissues apart.

  Desperately it clutched itself, as if to force its misshapen body back into form.

  Chase watched, fascinated, as the creature caromed from one side of the chamber to the other. Blood

  leaked from its mouth and ears; its eyes bulged, straining at their sockets, and it raised a hand as if to contain them. But before the hand could reach the face, one of the eyes launched itself from its socket—like a grape squeezed from its skin—and dangled grotesquely by red strands of muscle fiber.

  The image was surreal—a writhing, pulsing, swelling figure that might have been created by a lunatic sculptor and controlled by a mad puppeteer.

  "Two-fifty," Amanda said. "Two hundred . . . what's happening?"

  "It's on its knees," said Chase. "It's . . . holy shit!"

  The creature exploded.

  A thick crimson mist filled the chamber; globules of blood and pieces of flesh struck the porthole, and stuck.

  55

  CHASE stood in the hospital lobby, waiting for an elevator, and looked at his watch. He was more than an hour late.

  He had wanted to be there by two, but he had gotten stuck on the phone with Rollie Gibson and Nate Green, and had had to fulfill his promise to give Nate a detailed, exclusive story for the paper about what had happened on the island.

  Then, when he had arrived ashore, Rudi Franks had been waiting for him, alone and bearing a gift: an old, cracked black-and-white photograph of Ernst Kruger and Jacob Franks operating on Heinrich Guenther.

  Finally, there had been the confusion at the bank. He had stopped to cash a check, and one of the bank's officers had wanted to see him about something that made no sense whatever to Chase, something that had to be a mistake.

  The elevator arrived; Chase got out on the fourth floor and walked to the nurses' station.

  "You took your sweet time," said Ellie Bindloss, a short, chunky woman with whom Chase had gone to high school. "We're not equipped to handle eight-hundred-pound gorillas around here, y'know."

  "Sorry," Chase said. "Where is he?"

  She pointed down the hall. "Can't miss him," she said. "You'll hear him before you see him."

  As Chase approached an open door at the end of the hall, he heard Tall Man's voice shouting, "Sorry! What d'you mean, sorry! You just shafted me, and you did it on purpose."

  Then Max's voice, laughing and saying, "Tough, chief. Move your man."

  Chase paused outside the door, not sure what to expect, then stepped inside the room. "Hi," he said.

  "Don't 'Hi' me," said Tall Man. "This vicious kid of yours has beat my butt four games in a row. We oughtta feed him to the fishes." He laughed, then grimaced and clutched the bandages that surrounded his chest and bound one arm to his side. "Christ," he said, "laughing's no fun. But it's better than coughing."

  Max sat on the foot of the bed; between him and Tall Man was a board game littered with plastic cards and colored pieces. Amanda sat in a chair beside the bed, a newspaper in her lap.

  Chase hadn't seen Tall Man for two and a half days, not since he had ridden with him in a police helicopter and brought him to the intensive-care unit in New London. Then, Tall Man had been covered with blood and dirt, his color a dusty gray, his breathing rattly and weak. It had taken the doctors two hours to stop the bleeding, suture and reinflate the collapsed lung and begin the first of many transfusions. They had shooed Chase away from the ICU and, that evening, when they were confident Tall Man would survive, had urged him to go home and sleep.

  Chase still wasn't sure what had happened to Tall Man. He had started to search for him in darkness, but hadn't found him until nearly dawn, stuck between two boulders on the shore, unconscious. Tall Man claimed not to recall much, only that he had cut the creature several times, and then had felt himself stabbed in the right side and shoulder, lifted off his feet and thrown onto the rocks in the sea.

  There was a purple lump on Tall Man's forehead, and a line of stitches extending from his left eyebrow across his temple.

  "You don't look too bad," Chase said, stepping toward the bed. "Considering."

  "Yes, I do, I look like a mile of bad road," said Tall Man. "And don't you even think about touching me; I feel like a train wreck."

  Chase smiled. "Ready to go?"

  "Damn right. If I stay here long enough, they'll starve me to death or stick me to death . . . or both." Tall Man leaned forward, swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, leaning on the wall for support. Chase helped him on with his trousers and draped his shirt over his shoulders.

  Ellie Bindloss appeared, pushing a wheelchair. "Sit down," she said.

  "Never," said Tall Man. "I can walk—"

  "Sit down before I knock you down."

  Tall Man smiled, then laughed, then coughed. "You're a hard woman, Ellie Bindloss," he said, and he flopped into the wheelchair.

  Max pushed the wheelchair down the hall, Ellie walked beside it and Chase and Amanda followed behind.

  Chase told her about the photograph Rudi had given him, then said, "We've got to stop at the bank on the way back; I want to clear something up."

  Amanda hesitated before saying, "Clear up what?"

  "I don't know, the damndest thing. One of the officers told me the bank isn't holding my paper on the island anymore. He said they sold it."

  "Really?"

  "To a partnership. I thought for a minute they'd screwed me, sold it to Finnegan or somebody else who'd want to take over the island. But then the guy said I was one of the partners."

  Amanda didn't say anything, she just kept walking, looking ahead.

  "You ever heard of something called the Pinniped Group?"

  "It must be new," she said.

  "What kind of name is that, the Pinniped
Group? You know what pinnipeds are?"

  "Sure."

  "They're . . ." Chase stopped, and as the sense of what he was about to say hit him, the thought occurred to him that he had never felt so stupid in his life. "Sea lions. A pinniped is a sea lion."

  Amanda smiled and took his arm. "We'll talk about the details later," she said. "We'll have plenty of time."

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  After graduating from Harvard, PETER BENCHLEY worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, then as an editor at Newsweek and a speechwriter in the White House. His novel Jaws was published in 1974, followed by The Deep (1976), The Island (1979), The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (1982), Q Clearance (1986), Rummies (1989) and Beast (1991). He has written screenplays for three of his novels, and his articles and essays have appeared in such publications as National Geographic and The New York Times. In addition, he has written, narrated and appeared in more than a dozen television documentaries.

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