Beast (24 page)

It was an anglerfish: round, bulbous and brownish yellow, trailing short, mucous fins. Its eyes protruded like blue-green sores, it had fangs like needles of diamond, its flesh was crisscrossed with black veins. It looked like a cyst with teeth. Where its nose should have been was a white stalk, and atop the stalk, glowing like a beacon, was a light.

Sharp had seen pictures of anglerfish. They used their stalks as lures, dangling the lights before their gaping mouths to attract curious and unwary prey.

Because there was nothing in the background to compare it to, Sharp had no idea how far away the fish was, or how big.

“What do you think?” he asked Eddie, and he held his hands a couple of feet apart.

Eddie grinned, and held up his hand and spread his thumb and index finger: The fish was four inches long, at most.

Sharp heard the motor drive on Stephanie’s camera firing frame after frame. She was holding the lens against her porthole, and rotating the f-stop ring, hoping by random shooting to get a good exposure.

“I thought you only wanted monsters,” Sharp said.

“What do you think these are?” Stephanie pointed out her porthole. “Good God, look at that!”

Sharp saw a flicker of yellow pass Stephanie’s porthole. He turned back and waited for the animal to make its way around the capsule.

This creature seemed to have no fins; it might have been a yellow arrow, save that its entire digestive system, gut and stomach, hung down from a pouch and trailed along, pulsing. Its lower jaw was studded with pinprick teeth, and its black, milk-white eyes stuck out of its head like round buttons.

Soon, other animals swarmed around the capsule, drawn by the light, inquisitive and unafraid. There were snakelike creatures that seemed to trail hairs along their backs; large-eyed eels with lumps on their heads that looked like tumors; translucent globes that seemed to be all mouth.

Sharp started as Darling’s voice suddenly boomed over the speaker inside the capsule. “You’ve got yourself a bloody zoo down there, Marcus,” he said. “If the aquarium ever comes to its senses, I know where to drop my traps next time.”

“Wait’ll they see these pictures, Whip,” Sharp said. “They’ll come back to you on their hands and knees.”

Forgetting his fear, ignoring the cold, Sharp picked up the camera Stephanie had given him, and adjusted its focus. He knelt on the cushion, and waited for the next miniature mystery to swim by.

MIKE SLAPPED HIMSELF in the face, and the sting roused him for a moment. But as soon as his eyes returned to the screen of the fish-finder, he felt his lids begin to droop. He stood up, stretched, yawned and looked out the window. The ship was about a quarter of a mile away, and behind it he saw the gray lump of Bermuda. Otherwise, from horizon to horizon the sea was empty.

Whip had told him to keep his eyes glued to the fish-finder—he called it the poor man’s side-scan sonar—and for more than an hour Mike had. But the image hadn’t changed at all: There was the line that delineated the bottom, and just above it the little dot of the meandering submersible. Nothing else. Not a broken smear that would signal a school of fish, certainly not the solid mark of something big and dense, like a passing whale.

Normally, Mike wouldn’t have liked being left alone on the boat, but this was different: There was a ship nearby, and Whip was on it, and all the action was half a mile away and didn’t involve him. He had nothing to do but watch, and report in if he saw something. Best of all, he had no decisions to make.

He didn’t just feel calm, he felt hypnotized, not only by the static screen but also because the sea rocked the Privateer with such subtle gentleness that before he knew what was happening, he had twice found himself lulled to sleep. He might not have woken up at all if his head hadn’t banged against the bulkhead.

The radio crackled to life, and Mike heard Whip’s voice: “Privateer … Privateer … Privateer … come back.”

Mike picked up the microphone, pushed the “talk” button and said, “Go ahead, Whip.”

“How you doing, Michael?”

” ‘Bout to fall dead asleep. This is worse than watching paint dry.”

“Nothing’s going on—take a breather.”

“I’ll do that,” Mike said. “Make some coffee, go out in the fresh air and fiddle with that whoreson pump.”

“Leave the volume up and the door open, so you’ll hear me if I call.”

“Roger that, Whip. Standing by.”

Mike replaced the microphone on its hook. He looked at the fish-finder one more time, saw that the image hadn’t changed and went below.

In the wheelhouse, the fish-finder continued to glow. For several moments, the image stayed as steady as if it were a still picture. Then, on the right side of the screen, about a third of the way up from the bottom, a new mark appeared. It was solid, a single mass, and slowly it began to move across the screen, toward the submersible.

THERE HAD BEEN a change in the creature. Until now, as it had grown and matured, it had lived adventitiously, drifting with the currents, eating whatever food came its way. But food was no longer plentiful; passivity could not guarantee survival.

Its instincts had not changed—they were genetically programmed, immutable—but its impulse for survival had altered. It had started to become more active in its responses to its environment.

It could no longer live as a scavenger; it had been forced to become a hunter.

Hovering now at the confluence of two currents that swept around the volcano, the creature grew agitated; something was intruding, disturbing the normal rhythms of the sea.

It sensed a change in its surroundings, as if energy had suddenly surged into its world. There was a faint but persistent pulsing in the water; small animals darted back and forth, flashing bioluminescence; larger ones traveled nearby, subtly altering the water pressure.

The small and relatively weak human eye could not have perceived any light at all, but the creature’s enormous eyes were suffused with rod cells that gathered and registered even the smallest scintilla of light.

Now it perceived more than a scintilla. Somewhere in the distance below there was a great light, moving, emitting the pulsing sound, galvanizing other animals.

The creature had not eaten in days, and though it did not respond to time, it was driven by cycles of need.

It drew water in through its body cavity and expelled it through its funnel, aiming for the source of light.

It began to hunt.

YOU LOOK COLD, Marcus,” Stephanie said.

Sharp nodded. “You got that right,” he said. His arms were crossed over his chest, his hands tucked into his armpits, but still he couldn’t stop shivering. “How come you’re not?”

“I’ve got a layer of wool over a layer of silk over a layer of cotton.” She turned to Eddie. “Where’s the coffee?”

Eddie pointed and said, “In the box there.”

Stephanie reached over, opened a plastic box and took out a thermos bottle. She poured the top full of coffee and passed it to Sharp.

The coffee was strong, sour-bitter, unsweetened and harsh, but as it pooled in his stomach, Sharp welcomed the warmth. “Thanks,” he said.

He looked at his watch. They had been down for nearly three hours, drifting at twenty-five hundred feet, about five hundred feet over the bottom, and they had seen nothing but the small, strange creatures that gathered curiously around the capsule and then vanished into the darkness.

“What say I put her down on the bottom?” Eddie said into his microphone.

Darling’s voice came over the speaker. “Might’s well,” he said. “Maybe you’ll see a shark.”

Eddie pushed the control stick forward, and the capsule began to drop.

The bottom was like pictures Sharp had seen of the surface of the moon: barren, dusty, undulating. The submersible pushed a slight pressure wave before it, and mud rose up and billowed away as the machine moved along.

Suddenly Eddie straightened up and said, “Christ!”

“What?” Sharp said. “What is it?”

Eddie pointed at Sharp’s porthole, and so Sharp shaded his eyes and pressed his face to the glass.

Snakes, Sharp thought at first. A million snakes. All swarming on a dead body.

And then, as he watched, he thought: No, they can’t be snakes, they’re eels. But no, not eels either—they had fins. They were fish, some kind of weird fish, writhing and twisting and tearing at flesh. Bits of flesh broke loose and floated away, and were instantly mobbed and ingested and reduced to molecules by other, smaller scavengers.

One of the eely, snakelike things detached itself from its food and backed away and, confused or enraged by the lights, attacked the submersible. It thrust its face at

Sharp’s porthole and thrashed, as if to suck the entire machine into its belly. The face became nothing but a mouth, and around its edges were rasping teeth and a probing tongue. The body twisted like a corkscrew, frantic to force the face to drill a hole in the prey.

A hagfish, Sharp realized, one of the nightmare demons that bored holes in larger animals and gnawed the life out of them.

Eddie swung the submersible over the gnarled ball of hagfish, pressed its bow among them, driving them away, and then Sharp could see what they had been feeding on.

“A sperm whale!” he said. “It’s the lower jaw of a sperm whale. Do you see that, Whip?”

“Yes,” Darling’s voice said, sounding flat and distant.

“What the hell kills a sperm whale?”

Darling didn’t answer, but in the silence, Sharp suddenly thought: I know. And he began to sweat. He strained his eyes to see beyond the perimeter of light. Fish darted back and forth, not fading from view but suddenly appearing and disappearing, phantoms that crossed the rim of light. He was comforted by them and by what they signaled: Whip had once said that as long as fish were around, you didn’t have to worry about sharks, because, long before a man could, the fish read the electromagnetic impulses that warned of a shark’s intention to attack. It was when the fish vanished that you worried.

On the other hand, Sharp reminded himself, Architeuthis isn’t a shark. He raised his camera to the porthole.

THE CREATURE’S EYES gathered more and more light; its other senses recorded the increased vibrations in the water. Something was there, not far away, and it was moving.

Its olfactories detected no signs of life, no confirmation of prey. If it had been less hungry, the creature might have been more cautious, might have hung back in the darkness and waited. But its body’s needs were impelling the brain to be reckless, so it continued to move toward the source of the light.

Soon it saw the lights, little pinpoints of brightness piercing the black, and throughout its body it felt the thrumming vibrations emanating from the thing.

Motion meant life; vibrations meant life. And so, although it had yet to perceive the scent of life, it determined that the thing was alive.

It attacked.

THE THING’S NOT down here,” Eddie said. “We’re going up.” He pulled back on the control stick.

Sharp looked at the digital depth readout on the console in front of Eddie. It was calibrated in meters, and as Sharp watched, the numbers changed—ever so slowly, he thought, and he tried to will the numbers to flash faster—from 970 meters to 969. He sighed and massaged his toes, and wondered if they were frostbitten.

Suddenly the capsule jolted and yawed to one side. Sharp was knocked off his knees, and he grabbed for a handhold. The capsule righted itself and continued upward.

“What the hell was that?” Sharp said.

Eddie didn’t answer. He was hunched forward, his shoulders tensed.

Stephanie’s back was pressed against the bulkhead, her hands braced on the deck. “What was it, Eddie?” she said.

“I didn’t see,” Eddie said. “It felt like we hit an air pocket, or like a ship passed overhead.”

“You mean a current?”

Over the speaker Darling’s voice said, “Not a chance. There are no currents down there.” He paused. “Something’s out there.”

As Darling’s words registered with Sharp, he suddenly felt a weight like a sack of rocks in his stomach. Oh God, he thought. Here we go.

He saw that his camera had tumbled across the deck, and now, as he retrieved it and checked its settings and adjusted the focus, he found that his fingers weren’t working very well. They were trembling, and each one seemed to be independent and to defy the messages from his brain. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of his nose onto the lens, and he wiped it away with the tail of his shirt.

He looked over at Stephanie. She had her back to him, and her camera lens was against the porthole. She pressed the release button, and the motor drive fired a dozen frames in a couple of seconds. “Take some pictures, Marcus,” she said over her shoulder.

“Of what?” Sharp said. “I didn’t see anything.”

“The lens is wider than your eye. Maybe it’ll see something.”

Before Sharp could reply, the capsule was jolted again, hard, and it careened to the left. A shadow passed before the lights, dimming them, then disappeared.

“God dammit!” Eddie shouted, and he fought the stick, righting the capsule.

Sharp put his camera to the porthole and pressed the shutter release, advanced the film and shot again.

The capsule was rising again. Sharp looked at the readout: 960 meters, 959, 958 …

THE GIANT SQUID rushed through the darkness, seized by paroxysms of frustrated rage. Its whips lashed out, hooks erect, then recoiled and lashed out again, as if trying to flay the sea itself. Its colors flashed from gray to brown to maroon to red to pink, then back to an ashy white.

It had passed once over the lighted thing, appraising it; then it had tried to kill it, although the signs of life the thing emitted were vague and uncertain.

The thing had been hard, an impenetrable carapace, and it had fought back with vigorous movement and alien sounds.

Because its attack had created no encouraging spoor of blood or torn flesh, the squid had not pressed the attack. It had moved on in search of other nourishment.

But its cells were not accustomed to being denied; its digestive juices had begun to flow in anticipation. Now they were causing the creature pain, confusion and rage.