Beast (3 page)

The deck was awash now, and it was easy for them to heave the raft over the low railing into the sea. He held the raft with one hand and with the other steadied her as she jumped aboard. When she was seated in the bow, he stepped off the sailboat’s deck and dropped into the stern of the raft. He sat, flicked on the switch on the EPIRB, pulled out the antenna and fitted the device into an elastic strap on one of the rubber cells.

Because the raft was light and the northwest wind was brisk, it moved quickly away from the crippled sailboat.

Griffin took Elizabeth’s hand, and they watched in silence.

The sailboat was a black silhouette against the stars.

The stern sank lower, then slowly disappeared. Then, suddenly, the bow rose up like a rearing horse and slipped backward down into the abyss. Enormous bubbles rushed to the surface and burst with muffled booms.

Griffin said, “Jesus …”

IT WAS ALERT, had been for several moments, and its sensory receptors were processing signals of increasing danger.

Something large was approaching, from above, from where its enemy always came. It could feel vast quantities of water being displaced, feel the pressure waves.

It prepared to defend itself. Chemical triggers fired throughout the great body, sending fuel to the masses of flesh. Chromatophores ignited within the flesh, and its color changed from maroon to a lighter, brighter red— not a bloodred, for so permeated was its blood with hemocyanin that it was in fact green, but a red designed by Nature purely for intimidation.

It withdrew and cocked its two longest, whiplike arms, then turned and backed around to face the direction from which its enemy was coming.

It was not capable of fear; it did not consider flight.

But it was confused, for the signals from its enemy were unusual. There was no acceleration, no aggression. Most of all, there were none of the normal sounds of its enemy echolocating, no clicks or pings.

Whatever was coming moved erratically at first and then angled downward without pause.

Whatever it was, it passed and continued into the deep, trailing strange noises. Creaks and pops. Dead sounds.

The creature’s color changed again, and its arms uncocked and unfurled with the sea.

Random drift had brought it to within a hundred feet of the surface, and its eyes gathered flickering shimmers of silver from the stars. Because light could signal prey, it allowed itself to rise toward the source.

When it was twenty feet from the surface and its motion was beginning to be affected by the roll above, it sensed something new—a disturbance, an interruption in the flow of the sea, moving and yet not moving, floating with the current, on the water but not part of it.

Two impulses drove the creature now, the impulse to kill and the impulse to feed. Hunger dominated, a hunger that had become more and more urgent as it searched in vain for prey in the deep. Once, hunger had been a simple cue, a signal to feed, and it had responded routinely, feeding at will. But now food was a quest, for prey had become scarce.

Again the animal was alert: not to defend itself, but to attack.

THEY HAD NOT spoken.

Griffin had fired a flare, and, holding hands, they had watched the yellow arc and the burst of orange brilliance against the black sky.

Then they had returned their gaze to the spot where the boat had been. A few bits of flotsam had drifted by—a seat cushion from the cockpit, a rubber fender— but now there was nothing, no sign that the boat had ever existed.

Elizabeth felt a tightness, a rigidity, in Griffin’s hand, and she cupped it in both of hers and said, “What are you thinking?”

“I was doing the old ‘if only’ routine.”

“What?”

“You know: if only we’d left a day earlier or a day later, if only the wind hadn’t gone around, if only we hadn’t had to start the engine …” He paused, and then his voice was bitter. “… if only I hadn’t been too goddam lazy to get underneath the floor and check that pipe …”

“Don’t do this, Howard.”

“No.”

“It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

“I suppose.” She was right. Or even if she wasn’t, what he was doing was useless. Worse than useless.

“Hey!” he said, forcing brightness. “I just thought of something. Remember when Roger sold us the insurance? Remember we wanted the cheapest policy we could get, and he said no, we could never rebuild a wooden boat that big these days for anything like that amount, and he made us go the whole way? Remember that?”

“I guess.”

“Sure you do. The point is, the boat is insured for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We could never get that on a sale.”

Elizabeth knew what he was doing. She was glad, and she was about to say something, when the raft dipped off the top of a wave and slid into a trough.

They were capsizing. She knew it, they couldn’t stop it. She screamed.

Then the raft evened out and bobbed gently up the next wave.

“Hey,” Griffin said, and he edged over to her and put his arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay. We’re fine.”

“No,” she said into his chest. “We’re not fine.”

“Okay, we’re not fine. What are you scared of?”

“What am I scared of?” she snapped at him. “We’re in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night in a raft the size of a bottle cap… and you ask what am I scared of? How about dying?”

“Dying from what?”

“For God’s sake, Howard …”

“I’m serious. Let’s talk about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You got something better to do? Come on.” He kissed her head. “Let’s bring the demons out and crush them.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Sharks. Call me a wimp, but I’m terrified of sharks.”

“Sharks. Good. Okay. We can forget about sharks.”

“You can, maybe.”

“No. Listen. The water’s cold. The Japanese and the Koreans have fished most of them out anyway. And if some big shark does come around, as long as we stay in the raft we don’t look, smell or feel like anything he’s used to eating. What else?”

“Suppose a storm …”

“Okay. Weather. Not a problem. The forecast is good. We’re not in hurricane season. Even if a northeaster does come up, this raft is next thing to unsinkable. Worst can happen, it tips over. If it does, we right it again.”

“And float around till we starve to death.”

“Not gonna happen.” Griffin was pleased, for he found that the more he talked, the more he was able to push his own fears away. “One, the wind is pushing us back toward Bermuda. Two, there are ships in and out of here every day. Three, worst case, by Monday afternoon the kids and what’s-his-name from the brokerage will report us missing, and Bermuda Harbour Radio knows all about us. But it won’t get to that. This baby is beeping its heart out for us.” He patted the EPIRB. “First plane that goes over will call out the cavalry. Probably already has.”

Elizabeth was silent for a moment, then said, “You believe all that?”

“Sure I believe all that.”

“And you’re not scared.”

He hugged her and said, “Sure I am.”

“Good.”

“But if you don’t do something with fear—talk it away, change it—it eats you up.”

She put her head down into his chest and breathed through her nose. She smelled salt and sweat … and comfort. She smelled twenty years of her life.

“So …” she said. “You want to fool around?”

“Right!” he laughed. “Capsize in a fit of passion.”

They stayed like that, huddled together, as the raft drifted slowly south on the breeze. Overhead, stars seemed to dance in crazy unison, twisting and dipping with the motion of the raft but always moving inexorably westward.

After a while, Griffin thought Elizabeth had fallen asleep. Then he felt tears on his chest.

“Hey,” he said. “What is it?”

“Caroline,” she replied. “She’s so young… .”

“Don’t, hon. Please …”

“I can’t help it.”

“You should try to sleep.”

“Sleep!?”

“Okay, then. Let’s play Botticelli.”

She sighed. “Okay. I’m thinking of… a famous M.”

“M. Let’s see. Is he a … famous French—”

Elizabeth suddenly started. She sat up and turned toward the bow. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“That scraping noise.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Like fingernails.”

“Where?”

She crawled forward and touched the rubber on the forward-most cell of the raft. “Right here. Like fingernails scraping on the rubber.”

“Something from the boat, maybe. Forget it. A piece of wood. All sorts of floating crap out here. Could’ve been a flying fish. Sometimes they’ll come right in the boat.”

“What’s that smell?”

“What smell?” Griffin took a deep breath, and now he did smell it. “Ammonia?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Something from the boat.”

“Such as?”

“How do I know? We had a bottle under the sink… . Unless something’s spilled in here.” He turned and faced the stern of the raft and unzipped the lid of the rubberized box. It was too dark to see, so he bent over to smell inside the box.

He heard a noise like a grunt, and the raft bounced and lurched to one side. He was knocked off his knees, and the tins in the box rattled together, and the deck plates beneath him creaked and squealed against the rubber, and he heard some vague splashing sounds— probably of the raft slapping against confused wavelets.

“Hey!” He steadied himself with one hand on each side of the raft. “Careful there.”

There was no alien odor in the box. He zipped it closed. “Nothing.” But the smell of ammonia was stronger now. He turned back to face the bow. “I don’t know what—”

Elizabeth was gone.

Gone. Just … gone.

He had a split second’s sensation that he had gone mad, that he was hallucinating, that none of this was happening, that none of it had ever happened, that he would soon awake in a hospital after a month-long coma induced by an automobile accident or a lightning strike or a slab of cornice fallen from an office building.

He called out, “Elizabeth!” The word was swallowed by the breeze. He called again.

He sat back and took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He felt dizzy and nauseated, and his pulse thundered in his ears.

After a moment, he opened his eyes again, expecting to see her sitting in the bow and eyeing him quizzically, as if wondering if he’d had a fit.

He was still alone.

He got to his knees and hobbled around the entire raft, hoping—imagining—that she had fallen overboard and was clinging to a dangling loop of lifeline.

No.

He sat back again.

Okay, he thought. Okay. Let’s look at this rationally. What are the possibilities? She jumped overboard. She suddenly went out of her mind and decided to swim to shore. Or to kill herself. Or … or what? She was kidnapped by terrorists from the Andromeda Galaxy?

He screamed her name again, and again.

He heard a scraping noise, felt something touch the rubber beneath his buttocks.

She was there! Under the raft! She must have fallen over and gotten tangled in something, maybe some debris from the sailboat, and now she was under the raft fighting for air.

He leaned over the side and stretched his arms under the raft, feeling for her hair, her foot, her slicker … anything.

He heard the scraping noise again, behind him.

He withdrew his arm and shoved himself back inside the raft and looked forward.

In the yellow-gray light from the sliver of moon he saw something move on the front of the rubber raft. It seemed to be clawing its way up the rubber, scrambling to come aboard.

A hand. It had to be a hand. She had freed herself from the tangle and now, exhausted, half-drowned, was struggling to climb aboard.

He flung himself forward and reached out, and when his fingers were an inch or two away from it—so close that he could feel its radiant coolness—he realized that it wasn’t a hand, that it wasn’t human.

It was slimy and undulant, an alien thing that moved toward him, reaching for him.

He recoiled and scrambled toward the stern of the raft. He skidded, fell. The shift of his weight caused the bow to rise up, and he knew a second of relief as the thing disappeared.

But then he watched, horrified, as it reappeared and inched upward until finally it was entirely atop the rubber cell. It straightened up, fanned out, looking now, he thought, like a giant cobra. Its surface was crowded with circles, each quivering with a life of its own and dripping water like ghastly spittle.

Griffin screamed. No word, no oath, no curse or plea, just a visceral shriek of terror, outrage, disbelief.

But the thing kept moving forward, always forward, compressing itself into a conical mass and slithering toward him, walking, it seemed, on its writhing circles; and as each circle touched the rubber it made a rasping sound, as if it contained claws.

It continued to come. It did not hesitate or pause or explore. It came as if it knew that what it was searching for was there.

Griffin’s eyes fell on the oar in the raft, tucked under the cells on the starboard side. He grabbed it and held it like a baseball bat, and he raised it above his head and waited to see if the thing would come closer.

He braced himself on his knees, and when he judged that the moment had come he shouted, “Son of a bitch!” and slammed the oar down upon the advancing thing.

He was never to know whether the oar struck the thing or whether, somehow, the thing had anticipated it. All he would know was that the oar was torn from his hands and held aloft and crushed and rejected, cast away into the sea.

Now the thing, sensing exactly where Griffin was, moved more rapidly along the rubber.

Griffin stumbled backward, fell into the stern. He pushed himself back, and back, and back, desperate to squeeze into the tiny space between the cells and the deck plates. He reached—insanely, ridiculously—for his Swiss Army knife, fumbling with the snap on the leather case and mewling a litany of “Oh God … oh Jesus … oh God … oh Jesus.”

The thing hovered over him, twitching and spraying him with drops of water. Each of its circles twisted and contorted itself as if in hungry competition with its neighbors, and in the center of each was a curved hook which, as it reflected rays of moonlight, resembled a golden scimitar.