Peter Benchley's Creature (10 page)

"We got positioned, and the cameraman jumped in and started down. He went by me and gave me a wave, same for the next guy, then he grabbed the line at two hundred and stopped to adjust his camera and turn on his lights. The water was clear as gin, so I could see everything. He looked fine, in control, his bubbles coming up nice and regularly, which meant his respiration was good, no anxiety, no panic, nothing.

"A big grouper came out of his hole in the wall and hung there looking at the cameraman, who cranked off some film of him. Then the grouper got bored and began to mosey down the wall.

"Well, all of a sudden the cameraman looks up at the guy below me, waves, takes off his mask—his
mask,
for God's sake!—tosses it away and starts chasing the grouper down the wall.

"I started after him, so did the guy below me, and we were
humming,
but there was no way. We quit at two-fifty, and all we could see were the camera lights going down and down into that blackness, till they looked like little pinpoints."

"How deep was it there?"

"Two miles. I imagine he's still down there."

"Two miles!" Max said. "Did you feel it ... the rapture?"

"Mostly I was in shock. But there was one second when I felt a kind of weird envy of what the man must be seeing way down there in the abyss. As soon as I felt it I knew what it was, and it frightened me, so I grabbed the other diver and dragged both of us up to where we felt normal again."

"What about the bends? Have you ever had that?"

"No, thank God, and I hope I never do." Chase gestured around the room. "Sitting, right here," he said, "we have fourteen and a half pounds of air pressure on every inch of our bodies. Okay? Fourteen-point-five psi. Every thirty-three feet you go down diving, you pick up another atmosphere, as they call it; the air in your tank is compressed another fourteen-point-five psi. So at thirty-three feet, you've got twenty-nine psi; at sixty-six feet, forty-three and a half; and so on. You with me?"

"Sure," Max said.

"Now, remember what I said about the deeper you go the more nitrogen you breathe? Well, here it is again—nitrogen's a bad actor. If you stay down too long and come up without giving it a chance to vent out of your system—it's what's called decompression, you just hang in the water and breathe it off—a bubble of nitrogen can lodge in an elbow or a knee or your spinal cord or your brain. That's the bends. It can cripple you or kill you or give you what you think is bursitis for the rest of your life." Chase pointed at the steel cylinder. "That's why we have the decompression chamber, in case somebody gets the bends. The chances of it happening around here are pretty slim, considering how little deep diving we do, but when the Navy offered us this surplus chamber, I snapped it up."

"What does it do?"

"If a person gets bent, you put him inside and pump
the chamber full of air and pressurize it to the equivalent of the depth the dive tables say he should be at to begin safe decompression—a hundred feet, two hundred, whatever. We can pressurize the chamber to the equivalent of a thousand feet. Pressure puts the nitrogen back into solution in the person's bloodstream, so the bubbles disappear and he feels normal again. Usually. But it depends on how long ago he was bent and how much damage was already done.

"Then comes the tricky part. You reduce the pressure in the chamber very gradually, which is like bringing the person up from depth very slowly, almost inch by inch, so the nitrogen has a chance to flush itself from his tissue. Sometimes it takes as long as a whole day."

"What happens if he comes up too fast?"

"You mean
really
too fast? He'll die." They tossed their soda cans into a trash basket, and went outside.

On the southeast corner of the island, an enormous circle of concrete, fifty feet in diameter, had been poured into forms set in craters blasted into the ledge rock. The circle had been filled with water, and the natural boulders had been left within it to make platforms and caverns.

"It looks like the sea lion house at the zoo," Max said.

"Good for you . . . that's what it is. I had it custom-built for Dr. Macy's sea lions."

"Do you think I'll be able to play with them?"

"I don't see why not." Chase looked at his watch. "But right now, I've got to go make a couple of calls. Want to come?"

"Can I go ask Tall Man for a fish, maybe try to feed Chief Joseph?"

"Sure." Chase started away, then stopped. "But, hey, Max, remember . . . this is an island . . . water, water everywhere."

Max grimaced. "Dad ..."

"I know, I know, I'm sorry," Chase said. Then he smiled. "But you've got to remember, I'm pretty new at this fathering business."

Chase sat at his desk and stared at the fax copy of the bank-transfer slip. Dr. Macy's money would be good funds in the Institute's account at the borough bank tomorrow morning. He could pay Mrs. Bixler, he could pay Tall Man and the caretaker, Gene, he could clear his tabs with the fuel dock and the grocery store. He could even pay his insurance premium on time, avoiding a late charge for the first time in months.

He should probably frame the fax and hang it on the wall, the way some people framed the first dollar their business took in, because this ten thousand was a real lifesaver, the first step on the Institute's road to solvency. If he could keep Dr. Macy and her sea lions here for the full three months—and why shouldn't he? The weather would be good, and the whales should be passing back and forth till the end of September—he'd take in thirty thousand dollars, enough to keep him afloat till the end of the year. Maybe by then grant money would have loosened up for the bite-dynamics project; maybe he'd be able to wangle some charters from cable TV companies doing shows on sharks or whales; maybe . . . maybe what? . . . maybe he'd win the lottery.

Yes, he'd copy the fax and frame the copy. He'd
enjoy looking back at it later on, when times were better.

He wondered if Dr. Macy had any idea how critical her ten thousand was to him. And what did ten grand mean to her? Nothing, probably. The state university system in California sucked up hundreds of millions in grants every year. Ten thousand was probably petty cash to her.

He wondered what Macy herself would be like. All natural, he'd bet, fiber-loaded, fully organic, no preservatives, one of those women who smelled of lamb fat because their sweaters were knit from raw New Zealand wool, who wore little round eyeglasses and had dirt between their toes from walking around in orthopedic sandals and refused to eat anything that had ever lived.

He knew them well, from his days in Greenpeace, and found most of them to be either insufferably smug and self-righteous or ditsily, dangerously naive.

Anyway, he didn't care if Dr. Macy was the spawn of Tiny Tim and Leona Helmsley. Her money was good, and so was her project. The Institute's public relations—an element of his job that Chase loathed and wasn't adept at exploiting—could benefit from an association with her. Good video images of humpback whales, especially if they were breakthrough images of the kind Dr. Macy had supposedly gotten of the California grays, would be tangible evidence of serious scientific work. There would be stories in newspapers and on television. Brendan Finnegan would have to eat his words and find someone else to harass.

12

MAX'S foot slipped on the slick boulder, and before he could catch himself he skidded down its face and found himself standing in water up to his ankles. He called himself a few names, then sloshed through the shallow water till he came to a place where the rocks were smaller. He climbed them and continued his circuit of the island, stepping carefully from rock to rock, aware now of the truth of what Tall Man had told him: low tide makes for slippery rocks.

Tall Man had given him two fish to feed to the heron. He had approached the bird gingerly, for it was big, its beak was long and sharp and its dark eyes followed him as if he were prey.

Max had dropped the first fish, fearing for his fingers, and the heron had snatched it from the water, craned its neck and swallowed it whole. The heron had seen the second fish, and had taken a step toward Max. Max had forced himself to stand his ground, dangling the fish from his fingertips, and the heron had plucked it from him with surgical precision, its beak missing Max by millimeters. Then Max had tried
to touch the heron, but it had turned away and marched back to the center of its tidal pool.

Max had nothing special to do, his father and Tall Man were both busy, so he had decided to go exploring. At low tide, Tall Man had said, you could walk all the way around the island on the rocks, and he had already made it nearly halfway around, had reached the far southern end.of the island, before skidding off the slimy boulder and soaking his sneakers.

He came to a small pool—a big puddle, really— where the tide had receded from a basin in a boulder, and he knelt down and bent close to the water. He saw tiny crabs scuttling among the stones, and periwinkles clinging motionless to the bottom, as if patiently awaiting the next high tide. He watched the crabs for a moment, wondering what they were doing.that made them look so busy—feeding? fighting? fleeing?—then stood up and continued on.

The larger rocks were spattered with guano and littered with clam shells and crab shells dropped from the air by gulls, which would then swoop down and peck the succulent meat from the shattered shells. The smaller rocks closer to the water were coated with algae and weeds, and in niches between them Max saw matchbooks, plastic six-pack holders and aluminum pop-tops from soda cans. He picked up those he could reach and stuffed them into his pockets.

He came to a spot where the rocks looked too slimy and their faces too slippery for him to climb over them safely, and so he walked up the hillside and crossed twenty or thirty yards of high grass toward the biggest boulder he had ever seen: at least twelve or fifteen feet high, probably twenty feet long, a remnant of the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. He circled the boulder, looking up at it with awe, then began to search for a way down the hill to the rocks.

He walked between two bushes, tested his footing and started down.

Something caught his eye, something in the water, not far out, no more than ten yards away. He looked, but saw nothing, and he tried to articulate for himself what it was he had seen: movement, a change in the shape of the water, as if something big was swimming just beneath the surface. He kept looking, hoping to see the dorsal fin of a dolphin or the shimmering shower caused by a school of feeding fish.

Nothing. He kept going, walking slowly, stepping carefully among the wet rocks.

He heard a sound behind him: a splash, but a strange kind of splash, a plopping splash, as if an animal had risen out of the water and submerged again. He turned and looked, and this time he did see something—a ring of ripples spreading from a spot just offshore. There was a vague hump in the surface of the water, but as he watched, he saw it disappear.

He wondered if there were sea turtles around here. Or seals. Whatever it was out there, he wanted to see it.

But again, there was nothing. He walked another few yards and looked up to gauge the terrain ahead. The rocks on this side of the island seemed to be smaller, more cluttered with debris. There were pot buoys and big chunks of plastic and . . .

What was that? Ten or fifteen yards away, something was caught in the rocks, half in the water, half out. An animal of some kind. A dead animal.

He walked closer and saw that it was a deer, or the remains of a deer, for the corpse had been savaged, its flesh torn and stripped. There was no sickly smell of rot, no gathering of flies, which told Max that the deer had not been dead for long; this was a fresh kill. He couldn't imagine what had done this to so large an animal. Hunters? He looked for bullet wounds in the body, but saw none.

He was about to turn away, when he saw something in the head of the deer, something strange. He stepped forward, bent down, reached out. His foot slipped; he flung out his arms and tried to straighten up to regain his balance, but overcorrected and fell backward into the water.

The water wasn't deep, only three or four feet, and Max quickly found footing on the loose gravel. He stood up.

Suddenly he sensed something behind him—movement, a change in pressure, as if a mass of water was being shoved at him. He turned and saw the same vague hump in the surface. This time it was moving toward him.

He splashed the water to try to frighten it away, but it kept coming.

A surge of panic washed over Max; he turned back toward shore, leaned into the hip-deep water and paddled with his hands. He gained a yard, two yards, and now he was scrambling up a slope on his hands and knees, scattering rocks and gravel behind him. He pushed with his feet and reached for a handhold. His hand found the head of the deer, and he pulled. Something sharp dug into his palm, cutting it, but he held on and kept pulling.

He reached the dry rocks, lurched to his feet arid ran. He didn't stop until he got to the top of the hill. Gasping ragged breaths that were more like sobs, he looked down at the water. The hump had vanished, and rings of ripples were fading from the glassy surface.

Trembling from cold and fear, Max ran toward the house. He had covered half the distance before he felt a stinging in his palm. He looked at his hand and saw, protruding from the fleshy bulb beneath his thumb, the thing that had cut him.

Chase looked up from his desk and saw Max standing in the doorway, soaked from the shoulders down; a puddle was forming on the floor around his sodden sneakers. He was shivering. His face was gray, his lips nearly blue. He looked terrified.

"Max!" Chase jumped up from his desk, knocking his chair back against the wall, and crossed the room. "Are you okay?"

Max nodded.

Chase knelt down and began to unlace Max's sneakers. "What happened? You fall off the rocks?"

"A deer," Max said.

"A deer? What deer?"

Max tried to speak, but stammered as a spasm wracked his chest and shoulders and made his teeth clatter.

"Hey," Chase said. "It's okay." He removed Max's sneakers, socks, jeans and underwear, balled them up and threw them out the front door onto the lawn. He took two bath towels from a linen closet in the hall, dried Max off with one and wrapped him in the other. Then he led him to the sofa in his office and sat him down.

"Deer swim over here," he said. "Usually from Block Island but sometimes all the way from town. I don't know why they bother, there's nothing here for them they can't find somewhere else. They're a nuisance: they eat everything Mrs. Bixler plants, and they're loaded with ticks, Lyme ticks. They—"

Chase stopped, for he saw that Max was shaking his head. "What?"

"It was dead," Max said.

"What? In the water? It drowned. Yeah, they—"

"Something killed it ... tried to eat it ...
did
eat it, a lot of it." Max spoke haltingly, for he was still shivering. "I was on the rocks by the point . . . near that giant boulder Mrs. Bixler said her family always called Papa Rock . . . saw something in the water, caught in the rocks . . . saw its head and part of the rest of it. ... I got closer . . . saw there was nothing left behind about here. .  . ." Max touched his rib cage. "I thought maybe bluefish had got it ... like they did to that bird."