Beast (16 page)

As Darling closed the book, Sharp said, “Whip, Moby-Dick is fiction.”

“Not altogether. The whale is fact, based on a real incident that happened to a ship called the Essex.”

“Still …”

“You want facts? Okay, we’ll find you facts.” Darling pulled out another book, and squinted as he read the faded lettering on the spine. “The Last Dragon,” he said, “by Herbert Talley, Ph.D. This should do it.” Years before, he had turned pages down as marks, and he opened the book to the first mark. “Giant squid have been written about since the sixteenth century, maybe even earlier. You’ve heard the word kraken? It’s Swedish for ‘uprooted tree.’ That’s what people thought the monsters looked like, with all those tentacles snaking around like roots. Nowadays, scientists like the word cephalopod, which is a pretty good description.”

“Why?” asked Sharp. “What’s it mean?”

” ‘Head-footed.’ It’s ‘cause their arms, what people thought were their feet, spring right out from their head.” He turned to another mark. “Here, Marcus,” he said. “One of the buggers came up in the Indian Ocean and dragged down a schooner called the Pearl, just like in that woodcut. Killed everybody. There were more than a hundred witnesses.” Darling slapped the book. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out sooner. It’s so obvious. There’s nothing else that could have torn up our gear like that. Nothing else. No shark that’s ever swum is big enough and mean enough to break a thirty-eight-foot boat into splinters.” He paused. “And nothing else is so all-out, bone-deep evil.”

“But, Whip. Look at the date.” Sharp pointed at the book. “Eighteen seventy-four. That’s not today.”

“Marcus, those marks on the whale skin, you saw for yourself.” Darling took one of the claws from his pocket and held it up. “What kind of beast has knives like that?” Darling felt a growing sense of urgency. Suppose he was right. Suppose what was out there was a giant squid. What could they possibly do? Catch it? Hardly. Kill it? How? But if they didn’t kill it, what could they do—what could anybody do—to get rid of it?

He pulled more books down from the shelf, handed a few to Sharp, then sat on the couch and opened one. “Read,” he said. “We better learn everything we can about this beast.”

They pored through Darling’s books about the sea. The references to giant squid were sketchy and often contradictory, some experts claiming that the animals grew no bigger than fifty or sixty feet long, others insisting that hundred-footers, or bigger, swam in all the oceans of the world. Some said that the sucker disks of giant squid contained teeth and hooks; some said they contained one or the other; some said neither. Some said that they had photophores in their flesh, which made them glow with bioluminescence; some said they didn’t.

“Nobody can agree about anything,” Sharp said after he had read for a while. “That’s the bad news. The good news is that all the recorded attacks on people took place in the last century.”

“No,” said Darling, and he passed the Talley book to Sharp. “With this beast, it looks like there is no good news.”

Sharp glanced at the open page. “Shit,” he said. “Nineteen forty-one?”

“And not far from here, either. Twelve torpedoed sailors in a lifeboat. It was overloaded, and a couple of them had to hang overboard. The first night, in pitch-darkness, there was a scream, and one of the men was gone. Second night, same thing. So now they all crowded into the boat. The third night, they heard a scratching noise on the gunwale, and they smelled something. Well, it seems that the giant squid that had been following them—staying down during the day and coming up at night—was feeling around with one of his whips. It touched one of the men, snapped around him fast as lightning and hauled him overboard. Now they knew what it was, and the next night they were ready for it, so when the whip came up and started hunting, they jumped on it and cut it off, but not before one of the men got beat up pretty bad. The squid went away, never came back. The guy who got beat up, they found he’d had pieces of flesh torn away the size of an American quarter. They figure the animal was … what?”

Sharp ran his finger down the page. “Twenty-three feet,” he said. “The size of a big station wagon.”

Darling thought for a moment, then said, “How big would you say those marks on that whale skin were?”

“Five inches?”

“Judas Priest.” Darling stood up. “This goddam squid may be as big as a blue whale.”

“A blue whale!” Sharp said. “For crissakes, Whip, that’s twice as big as your boat. It’s bigger than a goddam dinosaur. A blue whale’s the biggest animal that’s ever been.”

“In body mass, yes, but maybe not in length. And sure as hell not in nastiness.”

As they headed back outside, they passed the dining room, and Charlotte looked up and said, “Whip, what’s this about a giant squid?”

“Giant squid? What are you, some kind of psychic?”

“It was on the radio just now. Somebody found something on a beach, and one of the scientists at the aquarium said—”

“Yes, Charlie,” Darling said. “It looks like we’ve got ourselves a giant squid.”

“They’re having a big meeting about it tomorrow night. Down at the lodge hall. Fishermen, divers, sailboat types. The whole island’s in an uproar.”

“I don’t wonder.”

“How big is a thing like that?”

“Big.”

“William,” Charlotte said, and she rose from the table and came over and took Darling’s arm. “Promise me.”

“Come on, Charlie. Nobody but a horse’s ass would make a run at a beast like that.”

“Like Liam St. John, for instance.”

“What do you mean?”

“St. John said on the radio that he’s going to catch it. To save Bermuda. He says he and what he called his ‘people’ know how to do it.”

“Fat bloody chance,” Darling said. “Dr. St. John’s gonna end up in the belly of the beast, and good riddance.” He leaned over and kissed her and looked beyond at the pile of papers on the table. “What are you girls doing, taking over General Motors?”

“Nothing,” Charlotte said, and she kissed him back. “Go away.” She started toward the table, stopped and said, “You had a call.”

“Who from? What’d they want?”

“They didn’t say. Foreigners. The one I talked to sounded Canadian. They just wanted to know if you were available.”

“Available for what?” Darling said. “Never mind, I can guess. If they call again, you can tell ‘em I was available, until about ten minutes ago. Now, all of a sudden, I think I’ve retired.”

WHAT A JOKE, Darling thought as he left the lodge hall. They had called it an island forum, but it had really been nothing but a charade, a vehicle for the premier, Solomon Tucker, to show the citizenry that he was concerned, without ever having to do anything. Not that there was anything anybody could do; but the premier hadn’t gone so far as to admit that: Like most politicians, he’d retreated from here to Christmas, without actually surrendering.

Everybody had been allowed to blow off steam and offer cockamamy suggestions for dealing with a monster that few people had ever heard of and nobody had ever seen. Now, if things calmed down and returned to normal, old Solly could credit “democracy in action”; if things got worse, he could lay off at least half the blame on the people, who had been asked to participate but hadn’t had any solutions. He was a winner either way.

Darling took a deep breath of night air and decided to walk home. It was only a couple of miles, and he needed the exercise after sitting for two hours. He figured the meeting would go on for at least another hour, with people squabbling over how to phrase the warnings that would have to be issued.

It was probably too late to worry. Thanks to Liam St. John and his everlasting crusade for personal publicity, this morning’s paper had carried the headline MONSTER IS GIANT SQUID, ST. JOHN CONFIRMS. By now, that news would be burning up the wires all around the world.

Some people had voiced the hope that the Newport-to-Bermuda race, which was already under way, wouldn’t be affected, but the part of it that benefited Bermuda already had been. Hotel reservations were down; caterers were finding themselves with no affairs to cater; taxi drivers were sitting idle, playing cribbage on the hoods of their cabs.

Even Darling himself had managed to lose a pile of money he didn’t have. Halfway through the meeting, Ernest Chambers, the diver who had offered Darling charter work during the race layover, had jumped to his feet and announced that two-thirds of his dive trips had been canceled, and what was the government going to do about it.

Predictably, Liam St. John had waited till things seemed at an impasse before he rose from his seat in the row of cabinet ministers and, after a vain attempt to make himself appear taller than his five feet four by fluffing up his helmet of pumpkin-colored curls, asked for public support for his plan of action.

Since nobody knew enough about the monster to pass judgment on St. John’s plan, a clamor had gone up to get Darling to say what he thought about it. After all, somebody had pointed out, “Whip’s caught at least one of everything God ever put in the ocean around here.”

And Darling had told them what he’d read, and his conclusions: that the appearance of a giant squid around Bermuda was probably a fluke, a natural accident; that since boats and human beings weren’t its normal food, in all likelihood it would eventually go away; and that to set out to catch or destroy it was pointless, because in his opinion no one could do it, Dr. St. John’s ambitious plan notwithstanding. In sum, Darling had said, leave it alone for a while and wait.

St. John had termed Darling’s approach “do-nothing defeatism,” and that had set off a new round of circular arguing.

As Darling had left, elbowing through the crowd of standees, he had heard someone mention issuing a formal Notice to Mariners, someone else suggest a press release pointing out that more people were killed every year by bee stings than by all sea creatures put together, and the premier announce the formation of a committee to explore options—to be chaired by Dr. St. John.

Darling walked along the road to Somerset, and thought about what to do. Part of the problem with all those people, he decided, was modern times. Back in the old days, they would have accepted the advent of something like Architeuthis without question. The unexplainable and unpreventable were part of life, and people learned to live with them. Not anymore. People were spoiled; they couldn’t accept a situation that demanded patience and offered no easy solutions.

As he came to a narrow part of the road, buttressed on both sides by high limestone walls, a car approached from behind. He stepped off the pavement and backed against the wall to let the car pass, but as it passed him, it slowed and stopped just ahead.

Now what? he thought. He looked at the trunk of the car and saw a BMW insignia. Somebody rich … and foolish: In a country with a speed limit of 20 mph, a BMW wasn’t transportation, it was a trophy.

A man got out of the passenger’s side and started back toward him. “Captain Darling?” he said.

Darling saw a tweed jacket and tan-colored pants and low-topped walking boots, but he couldn’t see the man’s face. “Do I know you?” he said.

“My name is Dr. Herbert Talley, Captain.”

Talley, Darling thought. Talley. There was something familiar about that name, but he couldn’t place it. “Doctor of what?”

“Malac— … well, squid, Captain. Doctor of squid, you could say.”

“You don’t have to talk down to me. I know the word ‘malacology.’ “

“Sorry. Of course. Could we give you a lift home?”

“I’m happy to walk,” Darling said, and he started around the car, but then he remembered, and he stopped and said, “Talley. Dr. Talley. You wrote that book, right? The Last Dragon.”

Talley smiled and said, “Yes. I did.”

“Good book. Full of facts. At least, I took ‘em for facts.”

“Thank you. Ah … Captain … we’d like to talk to you. Could you spare us a few minutes?”

“Talk about what?”

“About Architeuthis.”

An alarm bell rang in the back of Darling’s brain: This must be the man who had telephoned. Charlotte had said he sounded Canadian, and Talley’s pronunciation of the word ‘about,’ as if it were ‘a boat,’ was a dead giveaway. He said, “I’ve said all I have to say.”

“Perhaps you could listen, then, just for a few minutes … a drink?”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

Talley gestured toward the car. “Mr. Osborn Manning.” When Darling said nothing, seeming not to register, Talley said, “Manning … the father of the—”

“Oh yeah. Sorry.”

“We … he … we would appreciate a word with you.”

Darling hesitated, wishing Charlotte were with him. He wasn’t good at fencing with slick people. On the other hand, he didn’t want to be rude, not to a man who had just lost both his children. What would he feel like if Dana were eaten by some … thing? He couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to try. Finally, he said, “No harm, I guess.”

“Fine,” Talley said, holding open the back door of the car. “There’s a nice hotel around the—”

Darling shook his head. “Go up the road a hundred yards, pull in under a sign that says ‘Shilly’s.’ I’ll meet you there.”

“We’ll drive you.”

“I’ll walk.” Darling stepped around the car.

“But—”

“Shilly’s,” Darling said, and kept walking.

Shilly’s had once been a one-pump gas station; then, in succession, a discotheque, a boutique and a video-rental store. Now it was a one-room restaurant, owned by a retired shark fisherman. It advertised itself as “the home of Bermuda’s famous conch fritters,” which was a local joke since Bermuda’s conchs had been fished out years ago. If pressured, Shilly would serve a patron something he called fried fish, but he made his living purveying cheap booze. The skeleton of the old gas pump still stood in the parking lot, painted purple.

Darling could have let them take him up to the hotel; he had nothing against hotels. But they would have been comfortable there, and he didn’t want them to feel comfortable. He wanted them to be on edge, and to make the conversation short and to the point.

As he turned into the parking lot, he saw that the BMW was parked between two battered vans.