The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (40 page)

“We ought to check, Lars.”

He didn’t answer. Just stared off to where the snow was blowing.
Anemone
heaved on a long-backed sea, then sagged. The mast grated, dragging a few more feet overboard.

“Hadn’t we better cut that loose?” the Japanese suggested.

“There it is.” Lars didn’t point, or turn toward it. Just kept looking off to starboard. As one, they turned in the same direction.

*   *   *

The blowing snow made everything inchoate, softened, seen through petroleum jelly smeared over a lens. The whale rode up within a swell as if cast into it, like some enormous antediluvian insect sealed into graygreen amber. The gigantic squared-off head lay half turned toward them, one paddle-shaped flipper tilting this way and that to keep the whole mass floating miraculously motionless within the surge. It was anything but white. Dark seams ran though it, like mineral-laced travertine. Strange bumps and callosities speckled it, those, too, contrasting with what seemed to be its proper integument. Yet its unnatural paleness, suspended against the dark sea, filled her with all the terror Melville had ascribed to it. As the crest rolled away over it that crooked spout jetted, became mist, smoking in the wind, and blew away to leeward with the falling snow.

“What’s it
doing
?” Auer breathed, voice shaking. “Is it
watching
us?”

Kimura moaned aloud. When Sara glanced his way he was hauling himself atop the cockpit seat, steadying his ascent with a hand on the helm pedestal. He let go and swayed with the boat’s jerky roll. He made an obeisance left, right, to the left again. Pain crossed his face each time, but he bowed very low.

Straightening, he removed a Baggie from his pocket, tore it open, and scattered it about the cockpit. A few grains hit her face, and she tasted salt. He clapped his hands, bowed again to the whale, and raised his hands. Loudly, he began what she assumed was another invocation.

“Lars?” Sara said. He didn’t respond and she tugged at his arm. “
Lars!
”

“I don’t know what to do,” he muttered. “God damn it. God
damn
it! After all we risked for them—”

“Can we use the engines? Get away?”

“I smelled fuel,” Eddi said again. “I don’t think we even want to—”

“We’ve got to do
something
,” Sara said, but more to herself. Waves of dizziness were sweeping up from her feet, prickling her face, which burned as if it had been thrust into a furnace. At the same time her mind seemed to float free, regarding them and herself as if from some enormous distance.

The swell receded and the immense bulk, perhaps sixty yards away and longer than the boat, dropped with it, with incredible grace. The snow thinned and for a second or two she saw the whale quite clearly. It was arching its back in a strange way, the finless deformed-looking hump flexing until it pierced the roof of the sea. Kimura’s voice rose, droning on, sentence after sentence. For a moment she wondered: What is going on? Is this truly some sort of communication? Then the tail rose, immense, dripping, the sea running off it in creeks. When it dropped again the crash rolled like artillery.

“See that? He’s trying to shake the harpoon out,” Auer breathed, beside her.

Sara turned to see the aimed camera. The ruby filming light. Eddi’s knees were shaking, but her hands were free of the slightest tremor. When she looked back at the creamy-colored mountain that rode the swells Sara made out the shaft and the attached line dangling from its side, above the small lateral fin. The eye must be forward of it, but she couldn’t make that out.

“It’s waiting,” Eddi breathed. She crouched, gasping for breath.

“Eddi, what’s wrong?”

“It’s
waiting for us to help it.
” She dropped the camera and hugged her belly, as if slugged in the stomach. Then, with an abrupt gesture, unlooped the webbed strap and thrust it into Sara’s hands. “Here. It’s recording.”

“Eddi—hold on. What are you—”

But Auer was already climbing the sagging mass of fabric and wire and boom. Picking her way carefully but rapidly, dancing across that shifting mass like a tightrope walker. Kimura lowered his hands and stopped in midsentence. Madsen shouted hoarsely. Sara stood frozen. Then, without thought, lifted the camera.

Its screen framed something white against a darker ground. It took a moment before she understood it was a splash. From it a reddish form surged up and struck out in a clumsy crawl.

“Eddi!” she screamed, lowering the camera. A swell rolled past
Anemone
, obliterating the swimmer, rolling completely over her. Yet she emerged again. Short blond hair flew as she shook her head, raising it to look to where the whale lay off, flippers slowly flexing. It had turned slightly, so that its head was closer to the boat, but still did not seem to be moving from its station. Eddi looked back, then forward again; as if gauging the distance remaining to her, or perhaps reconsidering the wisdom of her act.

When she resumed swimming Kimura clapped three times. He bowed left, right, left again. Then resumed praying, in a higher note than before, in a tense rapid monotone. Slowly, Sara raised the camera again. Remembering only then how Eddi hadn’t dared to approach the right whales in the icy embayment. That seamed scar serpenting up her body, disguised by the writhe of tattoo—

Auer sank, submerged by a swell, then rose again on a crest. She’d almost reached the whale, which seemed to be waiting for her. Or was it simply lying to, resting? The great flukes started to lift, then sank back. It lay half tilted over, right side uppermost, the haft of the black shaft buried in its flank swizzling the surface with ripples of foam.

Eddi vanished, then came up again. Closer. Almost there. Sara shuddered. Even in the insulated suit, the cold water had to be paralyzing. Freezing a swimmer’s breath, numbing legs and arms and face. Already Auer moved more slowly, lifting her arms clumsily.

The immense tail stirred upward, then once again relaxed. The spout jetted and drifted away. The snow fell. The Dewoitine creaked and swayed as part of the fallen rigging slid off into the water and began hammering the hull at the end of its shroud wires.

The whale rolled, but kept its position relative to the boat. Auer was moving very deliberately now. An arm came up, lingered in the air, then sank. Seconds later, the other rose. But she was still forging forward. Only a few yards to go.

The animal rolled upward, then down. Sara could swear it was watching the approaching swimmer, though she still could not make out its eye, which must spend most of its time beneath the surface. Could it see her?

Hy tore apart another packet. Offering the salt in his outstretched hand, he called in English, “This we offer in purification and regret. Is there another sacrifice we can make? One more pleasing to you?”

By a great effort of will Sara concentrated on the little square of image the camera framed. In it a figure floated outstretched, one arm reaching for the dangling harpoon. The whale lay without stirring, head turned slightly in her direction. As if regarding her. As if considering. “God,” she muttered, the camera shaking in her hands so the picture jerked. “God. God.
Eddi.
”

With a delicacy so precise it looked almost like laziness, the whale stirred. It pivoted along its length, and the head moved with great majesty and deliberateness around toward its flank. It dipped beneath the surface as the back bent. Then rose again, dragging a dropped length of bone and flesh into view, the lower surface studded with long pointed yellow cones.

With a single leisurely sweep of its lower jaw, the whale bit Eddi in half.

The camera jumped in Sara’s hands. She heard herself screaming as the upper half of Auer’s body floated upward, spinning, mouth a round blackness, gazing back toward them, one hand raised, fingers splayed as if in unutterable agony. The stroke had stripped off part of her suit, and on the uplifted arm and shoulder Sara could make out the dark intaglio of creatures against shockingly white skin. Then the blond head tilted back, and went down into a welling cloudy pool of whirling pink. The tips of upraised white stiffened fingers were the last part of her to leave the light.

“Eddi!” she screamed. The camera dropped from unfeeling fingers, but recoiled before it hit the deck, restrained by the strap. Madsen was bellowing hoarsely, twisting the wheel, though it had no effect. Kimura stood in appalled silence, staring toward where the beast had slowly sunk from sight. A scrap of red fabric floated, then spiraled down. It glimmered beneath the surface, then grew obscure. Until the sea surged empty save for whirls of rocking foam.
Anemone
rose on a wave, then dropped away, and the burdening hamper scraped and slid. Something knocked the hull from beneath with the insistent thud of a battering ram.

Looking over the side, Sara saw a pale patch ghostly deep beneath the surface. The size of a handkerchief, perhaps. But as she stared down through the greasy snow-speckled surface the shape grew, swelled, neared, until she gave a choked gasp and stumbled back.

The whale burst from below with enormous force, blasting the sea open. The head emerged for many yards, lofting upward to cleave the snowy air, turning about its axis as it rose, rose; then fell back again with a crash of green water that rolled over the cockpit and knocked them all to hands and knees. Kimura somersaulted forward. His head hit a locker with a sickening thunk. Madsen crouched, clinging to the wheel. Sara found herself on the cockpit sole, panting, fingers digging into the worn teak gridwork on which her boots had grated for so many watch-worn hours.

When some seconds had passed and she was still alive, she pushed herself up, slowly, fearfully. Then came to her feet as Kimura gibbered in Japanese, rolling a bloodied visage from side to side.

Alongside the wallowing boat a gigantic mass slowly stirred. She leaned over to look down at it.

Down, into the monster’s eye.

Far smaller than it ought to be, that orb stared unblinking up. A film seemed to lie over it, but the soul that peered upward through it penetrated into hers. It was not empty, like a shark’s, whose blank eye conveyed naked hunger and nothing more. For an endless moment she met it; inhuman, yet intelligent; a recognizing gaze that clearly registered her own presence as a sentient being. Yet it communicated no sympathy, nor any indication of kinship. She shuddered.

A lid slowly drew down over that eye, and it grew dim. The whole immense furrowed stained mass was slowly sinking away, the sea’s graygreen filtering between them. Then it was gone, a mammoth specter retreating once more into obscurity, the deep. Only then, with a sob, was her aching throat suddenly released to breathe again, the frigid air searing her trachea, her whole body shaking.

That single glance, cast up from only feet away, had seemed to convey some message. But who could say what? All she could retain was what she’d felt, looking down into it. A focused hatred, an unbending, unending, utterly determined wrath. As if the gigantic animal had spoken aloud.

You are next. But not right away. I want you to suffer, to fear me, first.

Then I will kill you all.

20

The Chase—Third Day

They stood and lay about the cockpit for long minutes. No one spoke, save for Kimura’s moaning. At last Sara took a breath that reached down to her loins. She forced resolve into her voice, though pee was trickling hotly down her thighs under the suit. “Is it gone?” she murmured.

No answer came. She looked overside again, dreading the cold regard of that all-seeing eye; yet met this time only the murky, wind-churned depths, streamed through with tiny organisms, small shimmering oval jellies, blissfully ignorant of either existence or death. She staggered aft and peered over with the same result. Save that
Anemone
’s slanted stern was now plunging in and out as she pitched, penetrating the surface more deeply than ever before. An oily stain coruscated, smoothing the cat’s-paws the wind left even in the lee of the hull.

She lurched to the other side, to regard the soft patter of the snow, the rippled crest of a comber as it birthed from the mist and swept toward them, dimpled and veined like hardened obsidian. She stared out for long minutes, shaking. Was this how Captain George Pollard had felt, all those years before, after that first blow from the maddened beast that had attacked his ship? Waiting for it to return, and finish the job once and for all?

But the minutes throbbed past, and the dark seas swept out from the fog and vanished back into it; and it did not reappear.

When she shook Madsen, slumped by the pedestal, he flinched away, then shuddered before looking up. “Yeah. Yeah,” he muttered.

“Take these,” she said, and thrust bolt cutters into his gloves. Rooted in the toolbox and came up with a hacksaw. When she tapped Kimura’s shoulder with this he opened his eyes and blinked at it through matted hair and clotted blood. “My head…”

“Scalp cuts, Hy. You’ll live.” She hated the contempt in her voice. But a woman’s scorn could make men act. It seemed to now, for they stirred and rose, gripped their tools, and advanced on the wreckage that lay grinding alongside. Madsen angled the handles of the cutters. Hardened steel jaws snapped through a stay, and he moved to the next. Kimura said, “Help me here, please.” They both heaved on a mass of metal, then again, harder, until it screeched and slid off, leaving a ragged scar deep in the gunwale, and sank glimmering away, turning end over end as it departed the light.

When they were well at work she handed herself below. The salon was wrecked. Everything from drawers and lockers lay heaped in piles, shattered or broken. To her left water spurted in thin sheets through a crack that ran from the overhead to the cabin sole each time the boat rolled. The galley was if anything worse; even the dish racks were gone, wrenched from the bulkheads by the weight of what they held and smashed to flinders. Glass crunched underfoot, beneath water already a foot deep. She lifted her head and sniffed. An unmistakable petroleum cloy packed the air, more solidly as she moved aft. She cracked the door of her own cabin, Quill’s old stateroom; glanced in; eased it closed, sighing.