Fangtooth (5 page)

Saltwater stung his eyes, and he rubbed
them with the backs of his hands.

“Clive.”

He heard Gaynor shout and he looked back
towards the beach; saw she was waving, and then she pointed down to Jane and
Ben at her side.

Relief washed over Clive like a wave. He
exhaled a long sigh and let his legs drift up, floating on his back to breathe
as he circled his arms to stay afloat. I’m going to kill him, he thought. But
really he knew he was going to hug him so tight that Ben would shout for him to
let him go.

About to turn over and swim for shore,
he felt something brush his back. His first thought was more seaweed. Then
something grabbed him.

Clive gasped. Sharp pain erupted around
his waist. He kicked out and thrashed with his arms. Seawater frothed around
his torso like rabid foam. He reached down to prise off whatever had grabbed
him, felt sharp teeth and bony skin. Fear unlike anything he’d ever felt rushed
through his body.

Shark!

The creature pulled powerfully down, and
Clive sank into the deep. Bubbles surged past his face, and the inky blackness
turned red with blood.

Chapter 9

Shazam jumped to her feet and started
barking. Thinking she was barking at Zander again, Bruce was about to admonish
her when he heard the scream. It emanated from back along the road towards his
house and was the worst thing he had ever heard in his life.

“What the hell’s that?” Erin asked.

Zander jumped up from his boat and
clambered onto the quay. He stared into the distance where the sound
originated, then started running.

Bruce looked at Erin, pulled a quizzical
expression, and then ran after Zander with Shazam running effortlessly at his
side. Despite his regular jogs, Bruce found himself trailing behind Zander,
which made him feel somewhat annoyed. The pavement underfoot was cracked and
worn, and Bruce instinctively made sure he didn’t step on any of the cracks.
The last thing he needed was any bad luck.

Zander was out of breath when he reached
the beach. He could hear Bruce’s feet slapping the ground behind him, and he
increased his pace and charged across the sand. He wasn’t going to get beaten.
No one ever beat him. At anything.

He saw a woman and two kids at the edge
of the sea. She was gesticulating wildly and pointing towards the water.

“Clive. My husband. Something attacked
him. Oh God. I think it was a shark,” she said as Zander reached her.

Zander put his hands on her shoulders
and felt the slick sheen of suntan oil. He couldn’t help noticing how
attractive she was in her blue bikini. For some reason, a woman in distress
seemed highly erotic.

“Calm down,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Bruce asked as he
reached them.

“My husband. A shark’s attacked him.”

Both children cried as they clung to
their mother’s legs.

Zander shook his head. “There are no
man-eating sharks in these waters.” He knew that the most dangerous species,
Tiger, Lemon, Hammerhead and Great Whites’ didn’t visit these shores, so he was
pretty certain that the man hadn’t been attacked by a shark.

“A shark,” Bruce said with a look of
fear as he looked out to sea.

Zander exhaled loudly. “I just said
there are no killer sharks in these waters.” He hated landlubbers with a
predilection for melodrama with regard to anything about the sea. Jaws had a
lot to answer for.

“I saw him get attacked,” the woman
squealed. “Please, you’ve got to help him.”

Zander looked out to sea, but couldn’t
see anything. “You’re sure he’s out there?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

The children started to cry louder as
their mother raised her voice. This was crazy. Zander knew there was nothing out
there. The only explanation was that a strong current had dragged him under, or
he had a cramp and had been unable to swim. Whatever it was, there was no sign
of him.

The woman’s incessant crying was
starting to jar on his nerves. Zander tugged off his jumper and T-shirt to
reveal a physique sculpted by hard toil.

Bruce looked pensive. “I’ll stay here
and take care of the woman and her kids.”

Zander clucked his tongue and removed
his boots. Then he charged into the sea.

The water was colder than it looked, but
Zander ignored it as he put his head under the surface and swam powerfully away
from the shore. The saltwater reduced his vision, like looking through warped
glass. The sandy bottom dropped away quickly and darkness resided below.
Tangles of seaweed drifted by, but Zander couldn’t see anyone. When he was far
enough out, he dived down into the depths and swam around, trying his best to
find the missing man, but as he didn’t know where he had gone down, it seemed
useless. With his breath almost spent, he struck out for the surface and trod
water for a while to catch his breath. He looked back at the beach; saw he had
swum quite a way out.

He bobbed up and down as the sea rolled.
When he was at the top of one swell, he noticed what looked like a dark patch
on the surface of the water about twenty feet away. With a couple of powerful
strokes, he swam towards the area. As soon as he reached the spot, he
recognised the dark patch, had seen plenty of examples when throwing the
remains of gutted fish back into the sea: blood. He could literally taste it in
the air.

He took a deep breath, then dived back
into the depths. The blood made it even harder to see so he used his hands to
sweep through the water, searching for the woman’s husband.

A sudden movement caught his eye and he
turned his head and tried to focus. Five feet below him, something dark surged
through the water and disappeared. Without any concern for his own safety, he
swam down, entering a world where there was virtually no light. Sweeping his
arms back and forth, he searched the area, but couldn’t feel anything. Pressure
built inside his chest and his ears felt ready to pop. About to give up, he
felt the water swirl around him as something swam close by, and for the first
time, he realised that something really had attacked the woman’s husband, and
that now it was circling him.

Panic welled through his body, and his
pulse increased. He could hear the throb of his heart pounding in his ears.
With no idea how deep he had descended, he started his ascent, frantically
scooping the water with his hands and kicking his feet as though the devil
himself were after him.

He felt strange currents swirl around
his naked torso; thought he felt something brush against his leg. He needed to
breathe. Light permeated the depths. But it was a reddish light, filtered
through the blood suspended in the water like a huge, undulating jellyfish.
Uneasy, Zander swam through the blood and surged to the surface where he gulped
in a deep breath. He wiped the saltwater from his eyes; saw a thin film of
blood coating his skin.

Without hesitating, he made for shore,
arms and legs aching by the time he was able to stand and wade onto the beach.
He stood with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath.

“Where’s Clive?” the woman shrieked.

Zander looked up, breathing fast. He
shook his head.

The woman screamed, but Zander didn’t
pay her any attention. He stood up straight, put his hands on his hips, and
turned and looked out to sea. If a killer shark prowled the waters, then it
would explain the shortage of fish, and it might also explain the incident with
the nets.

Now he had a job to do. It was time to
go fishing.

Chapter 10

“So you didn’t see anything?”

Bruce looked at the young police officer
and shook his head. Shazam stood at his side, her hackles up and her ears
cocked as she looked out to sea.

The officer made a couple of notes. “And
you said Trent Zander went in search of …” he perused his notes, “Gaynor Dunn’s
husband, Clive?”

“Yes, he swam out and looked for him.”
Bruce stared across at Zander who stood at the edge of the water looking out to
sea. “He came back a few minutes later.”

“And he didn’t find anything?”

“Nothing that he mentioned. But …”

“But what, Mr. Holden?”

“Well, when he came out the water, he
was, I don’t know, pale. It was like he’d seen a ghost or something.”

The flashing lights of the ambulance
washed over the sand to his side, and Bruce gazed across at Gaynor Dunn as the
ambulance men helped her into their vehicle. She was in shock, which wasn’t
surprising. She had just lost her husband, and those poor children, a father.

He twisted the wedding band on his
finger and stared up at the cliffs where the silhouette of Lillian Brown, the
madwoman he had discovered in his house, was discernible against the blue sky.
He shivered. What the hell was she staring at? Perhaps moving here hadn’t been
such a good idea after all.

He realised the police officer was
speaking to him. “Sorry, could you say that again.”

“I said, will you be able to come to the
station to give a statement?”

Bruce nodded. “Yes, sure. No problem.”
An irrational fear struck him, fear for his son’s safety. He had been in bed
when Bruce left the house, but that had been a couple of hours ago. Unlike
Bruce, Jack was at home in the water, and he had mentioned only the other night
how he was going to go swimming at the first opportunity.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go,”
Bruce said.

The police officer looked at him for a
couple of seconds and then nodded. “Just don’t forget to call in at the station.”

“Come on
,
Shazam.” Bruce jogged quickly back up the beach to the road. Shazam bounded
along at his side. He stared up at the cliffs, but Lillian Brown was no longer
in sight. He didn’t know whether her absence made him feel better or worse.

When he reached the house, he ran inside
and called Jack’s name. Upon receiving no reply, he ran upstairs to Jack’s
bedroom, only to find it deserted, the sheets tossed on the ground and the
clothes he had been wearing the previous day missing.

Bruce knew it was taking a risk phoning
Jack on his mobile, as the wrath of a son who feels he’s being spied on wasn’t
worth thinking about, but Bruce felt anxious. The phone rang a number of times
before the automated voice of the woman at the message centre cut in to tell him
the person was unavailable. Bruce disconnected the call without leaving a
message. He was just being paranoid.

But what if he wasn’t? What if Jack had
decided today of all days to go swimming?

Today when there was something ravenous
swimming in the depths. Something with a taste for flesh.

Chapter 11

Erin McVey stood on the diving platform
of the research vessel and donned her dry suit. A slight wind tussled her hair.
She pulled her hood up. Her diving buddy, Kevin James, went through the safety
checks on her equipment, then she reciprocated, making herself familiar with
his releases, confirming that he had ample air for the dive, that the valves
were open
,
and that the regulator and
alternative air sources worked. On a final inspection, she checked for out of
place equipment, dangling gauges and missing gear. Their lives depended on
making sure everything was okay.

She had been diving here with Kev for
the last three weeks, taking samples of the local sea life. What had surprised
her was the lack of fish. Usually they flitted from the depths, bright shoals
in the glare of the Dive Light, but since she had been here, she had spotted
only a few solitary specimens.

She tested her regulator, which made her
recall her first diving experience and the alien feel of breathing underwater.
Unlike one person on her diving course, she hadn’t panicked, but it still took
a couple of days to get used to. Now it was second nature, and sometimes
preferable to being on the surface.

Erin had fine-tuned her buoyancy after eighteen
dives–for some people it took a lot longer. At depth, she had to add air to the
suit to stop it becoming uncomfortably tight. The downside was it added
buoyancy, so she’d had to learn to manage the air via an exhaust valve.

She strapped the five-inch titanium dive
knife to her leg.

Satisfied all the safety checks were
complete, she picked up her mask, gave a thumbs up to the crew on deck, then
stepped back to the edge of the platform and dropped into the water.

Kev dropped in beside her. He’d chosen
not to wear a hood and his black hair hung in the water around his face like
tentacles.

“You ready?” Kev asked.

Erin smiled. “Always ready.”

“What about willing and able?”

“Now that’s something you’ll never find
out.”

“Your loss.”

She grinned. “I’ll live.” She spat in
her mask and then swilled it in the water to stop it fogging up before donning
it.

Finally ready, she inserted her
regulator, gave Kev the thumbs up and dived.

She followed the guide rope leading down
from the platform. The water was a murky green colour, and after less than 20
feet, she switched on her dive light, illuminating tiny plankton in the beam.

Erin and her team had been assigned to
determine the effects of exploratory and development drilling, exploring the
impact on the environment, especially which hazards and environmental issues
had to be considered when planning to drill in a specific location.

Not all of her work took place out in
the field, but it was where she was happiest. Being stuck in an office didn’t
suit her, and after a few days she would start to feel like a mermaid out of
water.

When she reached the seabed, she spotted
a brightly coloured sea slug rippling across the rocks and an alien looking
spider crab skittering into a crevice. The sight of the various undersea denizens
never failed to amaze her. She’d once read that although three-quarters of the
earth is liquid, only one-tenth of one percent of the ocean had been explored,
and every time she dived, she felt she was entering an uncharted realm.

Shining her light across the seabed, she
marvelled at the various colours reflected back. She could see Kev at her side,
specimen bag at the ready, and she indicated the direction they should swim.

Erin felt truly liberated underwater;
felt it was the closest a person could come to flying.

Up ahead she knew there was a steep drop
off. Swimming over it made her feel vertiginous and disorientated, as though
she were over an abyss. The drop off was almost at the limits of how deep she
could go, so she didn’t intend going too close.

The seabed slowly shelved down, and the
deeper Erin swam, the less visibility she had. Despite the layers of thermal
clothing, she could still feel the cold permeating through to her bones. Within
her suit, she shivered.

As she swam, her thoughts drifted. She
recalled the man she had met a couple of hours ago, Bruce Holden, and a warm
thrill swept through her body. Although he was older than she was, she had
fancied him straight away. His charismatic look appealed to her. She had never
dated anyone with kids before–had never had a maternal streak–but in Bruce’s
case, she could make an exception.

Remembering the woman’s scream, she
wondered whether they had found the reason behind it. Perhaps she should have
gone to help, but work came first.

She made a gradual descent, adding air
to her suit to combat the pressure of the water while also keeping an eye on
the depth gauge. If she descended too fast, she would suffer the same kind of
ear popping experienced going up in a plane, which could be painful. When she
reached the depth she required, she wanted to be in a neutrally buoyant state.
Achieving that state meant she would sink a little when she exhaled and float a
little when she inhaled.

One thing she didn’t want to do was
contact any solid objects. Contacting the substrate would stir up sediment,
reduce visibility and damage the organisms that lived on the surfaces.

Kev appeared at her side. He indicated
to her that he was moving away to look at something. Erin acknowledged his
signal and watched him swim into the inky blackness. Almost out of sight, she
could see a dim corona of light from his dive lamp, almost ghostly in the
depths like the bioluminescence emitted by a host of marine animals.

Movement caught her eye. Expecting to
see a fish, she turned her head, but there was nothing there. She shone the
light around, following the course of its beam, but couldn’t see anything.
About to shine her light back on the path she was taking, she saw something
caught in the beam. Situated at the limits of the light’s reach, it appeared to
absorb the light. Erin frowned.

About to swim over and investigate, she
saw a flash of light to her left. She recognised it as Kev’s flashlight beam.
But there was something strange about the way it was moving, as though it was
being waved frantically.

A strange sense of panic swept over her.
She could feel the beat of her heart increase, could feel a thin layer of sweat
glaze her body. Something wasn’t right.

She watched the beam of light zigzag
through the ocean. Kev was heading towards the drop off. She could see that he
was already much deeper than she was.
What the hell was he playing at?

Fighting the sense of dread, she started
to swim towards him. Something moved in the blackness to her right, creating
currents of water that made the plankton swirl in the beam. She swept the light
around–thought for a moment she saw something large dart away. It looked too
large to have been one of the many fish supposed to swim these waters. But if
it wasn’t, then what was it? A porpoise perhaps? Or a seal?

She noticed Kev’s light had stopped
moving. Relieved, she started swimming towards him.

Erin glanced at her depth gauge. She was
at the absolute safe limits of her dive. Kev was at least another ten feet
lower. It wasn’t like him to do something so hazardous. He knew the dangers of
going too deep. At this depth, it could be fatal. If they stayed down too long
and too deep, they risked the bends, a painful condition caused by nitrogen
bubbles in the blood.

She swam closer to Kev, regulating the
air in her suit as she went. From the look of it, he was on the lip of the drop
off. The thought of the great depths below where he sat made her feel nauseous.
Or was it something else making her feel ill? The pressure?

She shone her light towards him, trying
to attract his attention. But he didn’t respond. Still unable to see him
clearly, she descended deeper. She looked at her depth gauge.
There had
better be a damn good reason for
this
, she thought.

Close enough now to see him clearly, she
thought her eyes were playing tricks. He looked to be buried in the seabed. All
she could see was one of his shoulders, his head, and one hand holding the
light, the beam of which pointed down into the depths.

Strong currents rose from the drop off,
making Kev’s hair undulate like tentacles. Erin shuddered. Something wasn’t
right. The substrate had been disturbed. A pale cloud drifted around his torso.
She swam closer; her beam of light illuminated a thin red veil wafting gently
around his shoulder. She narrowed her eyes, trying to see clearly.

When she reached Kev, Erin reached out
and tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t respond. Her mind whirled with
questions. Fear circulated around her body. She grabbed his wrist and pulled.

And Kev’s severed torso gently rose from
the substrate, leaving behind a thin red cloud of blood that swirled in the
currents rising from the depths.

Erin’s eyes went wide. She gagged and
the regulator flew from between her lips. Bubbles streamed from her mouth as
she tried to scream in the water. She gurgled, almost choked. Frantic, she let
go of Kev and searched for her regulator, sweeping her arm around in the
growing gloom of blood and substrate.

Something moved in the darkness below
the drop off. Erin gagged again. She floundered in the water.
Where was that
damn regulator?
Her hands brushed against it, and she grabbed it and
reinserted it between her lips; took a welcome breath.

She looked back at Kev’s body. Ragged
strips of flesh waved in the water from his severed torso.

She watched Kev’s severed body fall over
the edge of the drop off and descend into the depths. The beam of his lamp
spiralled down, creating a macabre red swirling vortex as it illuminated the
blood.

Crazy thoughts fought for dominance in
her mind. How the hell had he died? What the fuck was down here that could bite
a man in two? And more importantly, where was it now?

She spun around, pointing her light in
all directions.

Erin felt totally alone. Panic swelled
in her chest, aggravating her breathing. She willed her pulse to slow, fought
not to lose control.

The beam illuminated something black
that swam quickly out of sight. But from what she had seen, it had been big,
very big. The blood froze in her veins.

Calm yourself girl, she thought. The
surface is a long way up.

She considered an emergency ascent, but
rising too quickly from such a great depth would result in the bends. So what
else could she do?

She remembered the object she had seen
at the limits of the light’s beam before Kev had distracted her. It occurred to
her that it was a vessel of some sort.

Although she needed to get to the
surface, she wanted to gather her wits. If she could hide for a little while,
then maybe whatever was circling would swim away. Swimming faster than she had
ever swum before, Erin kicked out into the cold water.

Something flitted about to her left. She
flashed the light at it, saw two huge malevolent quicksilver eyes reflected in
the darkness. Her heart leaped into her throat, but before she could identify
it, the creature vanished into the depths.

Panicked, Erin felt her strength ebbing
away. Whatever it was down here, she was in its domain.

The sunken vessel she had seen briefly
in the glare of the light appeared ahead. She felt a moment of relief. Then the
beam illuminated a jagged maw of teeth almost as long as her forearm–teeth
poised to take a chunk out of her torso.