Beast (13 page)

Darling was convinced that St. John saw him as a threat to his power, a rebel against the construction of his little empire. St. John was determined to bring Darling to heel … or to destroy him.

And what rankled Darling, what ate away at his guts, was the fact—more evident day by day—that St. John was succeeding. He had all the weapons.

“There,” said Mike, pointing to some floating wood. It was about three by five feet, with a patch of indoor-outdoor carpeting nailed to it and two short lengths of chain dangling from it.

“Swim step,” Darling said. “Bring it aboard.”

Mike went outside, grabbed the boat hook and went aft, while Darling climbed the ladder to the flying bridge.

From up here, twelve feet above the surface, he could see debris everywhere, some a foot underwater, some bobbing on the surface. There were fenders, planks, cushions, life jackets.

The water was patched with rainbow slicks: oil that had leaked from the engine as the boat sank.

“Sling it all aboard,” he called down to Mike.

For an hour he cruised among the debris, as Mike grabbed piece after piece of flotsam and tossed it into the cockpit.

“Want that too?” Mike said, pointing to a white wooden rectangle, twelve feet wide by fifteen feet long, that hung a foot or two beneath the surface.

“No, that’s his roof,” Darling said from the flying bridge. Then something came to him, and he said, “Hang on,” and he put the boat in neutral, letting it drift, and went down the ladder. He picked up a four-pronged grapnel attached to twenty feet of rope, and he tossed the hook at the wood. He let it drop till it caught the far edge, then he hauled back on it, dragging the corner of the roof out of water. He had a glimpse of pea-soup green on the underside of the roof.

“It’s Lucas Coven’s boat,” he said, letting the wood fall back, coiling the rope as he brought the hook aboard.

“How d’you know that?”

“I saw him painting the boat last spring. He was doing the whole inside of the house in baby-shit green. Said he’d got the paint on sale.”

“What the hell was he doing out here?”

“You know Lucas,” Darling said. “Probably had some half-ass scheme to make two dollars in a hurry.”

They had known Lucas Coven for more than twenty years and always thought of him as suffering from a case of the “almosts”: everything Coven did he could almost make a living at, almost but not quite. He couldn’t afford enough fish traps to cover his boat expenses, and when traps were outlawed he had no other trade. He’d do anything for a few bucks—haul water, paint houses, build docks—but he never stuck with anything long enough to make a steady go of it.

“How do you make two dollars out here? Nothing here.”

“No,” Darling agreed. “Nothing but the Durham.”

“Nobody dives on the Durham … nobody with sense.”

“Right again. Let’s have a look.” Darling picked up a rubber fender. There were no marks on it, no scratches, no scars, no burns.

“He had a GM in her, didn’t he?” Mike said.

“Yeah. Six-seventy-one.”

“So that didn’t blow him up. Propane stove?”

“Maybe. But Christ, they’d’ve heard that bang all the way in St. George’s.” Darling picked up a section of planking with a brass screw-cap countersunk in it.

“So what blew him up? He carry explosives?”

Darling said, “Nothing blew him up. Look here. No char, no smoke, no disintegration like you’d see in an explosion.” He put his nose to the wood. “No stink. You’d smell it if there’d been heat to it.” He tossed the wood onto the deck. “He was busted up … somehow.”

“By what? Nothing out here for him to hit.”

“I don’t know. Killer whales? This was a wooden boat. Killer whales could splinter a wooden boat.”

“Killer whales!? In hailing distance of the beach?”

“You come up with something, then.” Darling felt anger welling up again. Mike always wanted answers, and it seemed he had fewer and fewer of those. “What else? UFOs? Martians? The frigging Tooth Fairy?” He dropped the wood onto the deck.

“Hey, Whip …” Mike said.

Annoyed now with himself, Darling said, “Shit!” and kicked a life jacket, which rose off the deck and would have gone overboard if Mike hadn’t caught it.

Mike was about to toss it aside when he noticed something. “What’s this?”

Darling looked. The orange cloth covering the kapok had been shredded, and the buoyant material beneath was exposed. There were two marks in it, circles, about six inches in diameter. The rim of each circle was ragged, as if it had been cut by a rasp, and in the center was a deep slash.

“For God’s sake,” Darling said. “Looks like a scuttle.”

“Sure.” Mike thought Darling was joking. An octopus? “Moby-bleeding-scuttle,” he said. “Besides, you ever seen a scuttle with teeth in its suckers?”

“No.” Mike was right. The suckers on an octopus’s arms were soft, pliable. A man could unwrap them from around his arm as easily as removing a bandage.

But what was it, then? It was an animal, for certain. This boat hadn’t blown up, hadn’t hit anything, hadn’t been struck by lightning, hadn’t magically disintegrated. It had come up against something and been destroyed.

Darling tossed the life jacket onto the deck and kicked some pieces of wood aside to clear his way forward. One of the planks struck the steel bulwark, and as it fell back to the deck something dropped out of it and landed with a click.

It was a claw, like the other one, crescent-shaped, two inches long and sharp as a razor.

He looked overboard, at the still water. But the water wasn’t really still, it was alive, and, as if to remind Darling, it sent a gentle swell at him that heaved the boat upward.

As the boat settled again, something floated out from underneath it: rubber, blue with a yellow chevron on either side.

A wetsuit hood.

Darling picked up the boat hook and dipped it overboard and scooped up the hood. It came up like a cup, full of water, and in the water were two little black-and-yellow-striped fish: sergeant majors. They were feeding on something.

Darling held the hood in his hand. A smell rose from it, sharp and acrid. Like ammonia.

His body was shadowing the hood, so he turned into the sun and let light fall into the dark pocket.

What the fish were feeding on looked like a big marble.

Mike came up behind Darling and looked over his shoulder. “What’ve you— Holy sweet Jesus!” Mike gasped. “Is that human?”

“It is,” said Darling, and he stood aside to let Mike retch into the sea.

THE WOMAN WATCHED through her telescope until her head ached and her vision began to blur. She had seen the navy helicopter come and go, and seen Whip Darling show up in that ramshackle Privateer. But where were the police? She had done her civic duty by reporting what she saw; the least the police could do was follow up.

Now it looked as if someone were throwing up over the side. Probably hung over. Fishermen were all the same: fish all day and drink the night away.

If the police weren’t going to respond, perhaps she should call the newspaper. Sometimes reporters were more diligent than the police. The only reason she hadn’t called the paper earlier was that she was worried that one of her humpbacks might have wrecked the boat—by accident, of course—and an ignorant reporter might be tempted to say bad things about whales. But she had looked and looked, and seen no sign of whales, no spouting, no flukes, so it was probably safe by now to call the paper.

The reporter stared at the flashing light on his telephone as he hurried to pull a notepad from his desk drawer, and blessed his luck. He had been trying to find this woman for an hour, ever since he had heard the first reports on the newsroom’s police-band radio, but Harbour Radio had refused to give him her name.

This story could be his ticket out of the trenches, his passport to the big time. He had spent the past three years writing on numbing topics like the fish-trap controversy and the rise in import duties, and he had begun to despair that he’d never get off this godforsaken rock. The problem with Bermuda was that nothing ever happened here, at least nothing of interest to the wire services or the news magazines or the television networks.

But this was different. Deaths at sea, especially deaths under mysterious circumstances, were dynamite. If he could play up the mystery, maybe impose a Bermuda Triangle slant on it, he might catch the eye of the AP or the Cleveland Plain Dealer or, dream of dreams, The New York Times.

He had about given up on the woman and was on his way out the door to go to Somerset, to wait for Whip Darling, when the switchboard operator had relayed the call.

He pushed the flashing button and said, “Brendan Eve, Mrs. Outerbridge. Thank you for calling.”

He listened for a few minutes, then said, “You’re sure it didn’t explode?”

Again she talked, and again he listened. Lord, but the woman could talk! By the time she had finished, he saw that he had scribbled four pages of notes. He could write a treatise on the history of humpback whales.

But there had been nuggets of value in the woman’s monologue. He noticed that there was one phrase he had written down several times, and he underlined it: “sea monster.”

DOCTOR HERBERT TALLEY hunched his shoulders and shielded his face against the wind, a roaring northeaster that drove salt water off the ocean and blended it with rain, creating a brackish spray that burned leaves brown. He stepped in a puddle and felt icy water slop over his shoe tops and seep between his toes.

It might as well be winter. The only difference between summer and winter in Nova Scotia was that by winter all the leaves had been blown away.

He crossed the quadrangle, stopped at Commons to pick up his mail and climbed the stairs to his tiny office. He was winded by the exertion, which annoyed, but didn’t surprise, him. He wasn’t getting enough exercise. He wasn’t getting any exercise. The weather had been so vile for so long that he hadn’t been able to swim or jog. He had taken pride in being a young fifty, but he was beginning to feel like an old fifty-one.

He vowed to start exercising tomorrow, even in a whole gale. He had to. To go to flab would be to admit defeat, to accept the loss of his dreams, to resign himself to whiling away his days as a teacher. Some might say that academia was the graveyard of science, but Herbert Talley wasn’t ready to be buried just yet.

Days like today didn’t help. A grand total of six students had showed up for his lecture on cephalopods: six stuporous summer-school students, misfits who had been denied their diplomas until they passed their science requirement. He had done his best to infuse them with his enthusiasm. He was among the world’s leading experts on cephalopods, and he found it incredible that they couldn’t share his appreciation of the wondrous head-foots. Perhaps the fault lay in him. He was an impatient teacher, who preferred showing to instructing, doing to telling. On field trips and expeditions he was a wizard. But there weren’t any more expeditions, not with the economy of the Western world about to implode.

Talley’s office had room for a desk and a desk chair, a lounge chair and reading lamp, a bookcase and a table for his radio. One wall was taken up with a National Geographic map of the world, which Talley had dotted with pushpins representing events in malacology: expeditions of which he was keeping track, sightings of rare species, depredations by pollution and cyclical calamities like red tides and toxic algae blooms, which could be natural or man-made. The other walls contained his framed degrees, awards, citations and photographs of the celebrities of his field: octopus and squid and oysters and clams and conchs and cowries and chambered nautiluses.

Talley hung his hat and raincoat on the back of the door, turned on the radio, plugged in the electric kettle for water for tea and sat with his airmail copy of The Boston Globe, the only newspaper he had access to that recognized the existence of issues other than fishing and petty crime.

There was no news, really, at least nothing to excite an aging malacologist stuck in the wilds of Nova Scotia. Everything was more of the same.

Lulled by Bruno Walter’s soothing rendition of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and by the patter of rain and the whisper of wind, warmed by his tea, Talley struggled to stay awake.

Suddenly his eyes snapped open. A phrase—one phrase out of all the thousands of words on the enormous page in his lap—had infiltrated his doziness and imprinted itself on his mind. It had awoken him like an alarm.

Sea monster.

What about it? What sea monster?

He scanned the page, couldn’t find it, ran down each column top to bottom, and then … there it was, a tiny item on the bottom of the page, a filler, what was called boilerplate.

THREE DIE AT SEA

Bermuda (AP)—Three persons died yesterday when their boat sank from unknown causes off the shore of this island colony in the Atlantic Ocean. The victims included the two children of media magnate Osborn Manning.

There was no evidence of explosion or fire, and some local residents speculated that the boat had been struck by lightning, though no electrical storms had been reported in the area.

Others, recalling the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, blamed the incident on a sea monster. The only clues noted by police were strange marks on wooden planks and an odor of ammonia in some of the debris.

Talley held his breath. He read the item again, and again. He rose from his chair and went to the wall map. His pushpins were color-coded, and he searched for red ones. There were only two, both off Newfoundland, both marked with reference dates from the early 1960s. Off Bermuda there was nothing.

Until now.

Obviously, the reporter hadn’t known what he was writing about. He had gathered facts and lumped them together, not realizing that he was inadvertently including the key to the puzzle.

Ammonia. Ammonia was the key. Talley felt a thrill of discovery, as if he had suddenly stumbled upon a new species.

This species wasn’t new, however; it was Talley’s old nemesis, his quarry, a creature he had spent a large part of his professional life seeking, a creature he had written books about.