Spider Legs (23 page)

CHAPTER 33

Snout

N
ATHAN STOOD ON
the bridge with Captain Calamari, Falow, and Rudolph while Natalie checked the decks. Outside thunder boomed as an occasional streak of blue-white lightning stabbed the ocean near the horizon. Mists flowed onto the bridge, making the ferry's steering wheel the only solid reality in a shifting world. To their left were several cigarette butts which had been crushed in the congealing gravy on mashed potatoes. Some of the men from the engine room had been smoking more than usual.

“Uggh,” Calamari said. “My stomach’s killing me, and I'll be lucky if I don't get diarrhea. I don't need this.”

“You do look tired, Captain,” Falow said. “Dark circles under your eyes.”

The captain's face was white, his eyes listless. “You don't look so great yourself, Chief,” he retorted.

“The weather is not helping matters.” The ferry seemed to be swallowed up in a murky olive-brown fog, shot here and there with shimmering streaks of an ochre tint. Falow quickly grabbed hold of a life preserver that the wind had torn free and was about to toss into the sea.

“How does a man as big as you move so quickly?” Calamari
asked. He winced as a cramp evidently wracked his bowels but luckily passed. Outside there were little lines of lightning that reminded Nathan of a sparkler. The flickers continued.

“Years of practice.”

They talked about inconsequential, perhaps trying to distract themselves from the horror of their reality. Like most Newfoundlanders, the captain said, he usually enjoyed all the local wildlife—both the animals and the plants. He particularly liked the flowering plants. In Newfoundland, beautiful wild flowers bloomed, seeded, and died all in a rush; plants flourished and perished quickly in areas of short summers and longer winters.

In northern areas of Newfoundland, he remarked, where flowers were less plentiful, the sea ice buckled into canyons of blue and turquoise pastel, and Eskimo women searched for crabs. A herd of reindeer would sweep across the tundra by the Labrador sea, food for the Eskimos and wolves. Bowhead whales were still caught and butchered. Their skin was cut into strips called muktuk, considered a delicacy. When a local entrepeneur had approached Calamari and the ferry line management to open a muktuk bar on the ferry, they declined, pointing out that muktuk would not appeal to the tourists or ecologically-minded tourists. Nathan understood how that could be the case.

Suddenly Rudolph cried out, “Big object on the sonar screen, closing fast.”

“Any chance we could be running into an iceberg?” Nathan asked.

“Ice is a poor reflector of radar waves,” Calamari said. “Even with a strong signal, which we don't have, we can't definitely identify icebergs. I wish we had one of those microwave radiometers. That would have told us more.”

“So it could be an iceberg,” Falow said. “Let's hope we don't run into it.”

“On a clear day,” the captain said, “I can see a berg from this ferry more than ten miles away. Tonight of course, we couldn't see it until we had hit it.”

Calamari picked up the intercom microphone and spoke just
two words to the passengers, “Brace yourself.” He then turned toward Rudolph. “Tell the men to get the life-rafts ready.”

The captain's orders rang through the ferry. Aft and forward, the small crew snapped into action. The ferry's clock chimed out 10
P.M.
in nautical couplets. Calamari studied the incredible maze of gauges and dials before him—manometers, shaft revolution indicators, vent opening indicator boards and various levers glistening with elbow-grease. He looked so helpless. Nathan knew that there was little he could do without working engines.

A small electrician crawled down into the battery pits under the compartment decks and was able to get some of the backup power restored to the ferry. As the dwarf Dutchman rose from the pits he sneezed from the acid fumes but gave Calamari the thumb's-up signal. The lights on the ferry's control panel lit up like a Christmas tree and then began to dim slightly.

The captain turned on a nearby sodium-vapor light and aimed it at the murky ocean waves. A urine-yellow glare reflected from the waves, but there was no sign of the leviathan. Calamari's light penetrated into a gray fog that hid the ocean and made it seem to Nathan as if he could invent any shape in the water that he wished.

The reports came to Calamari's control room over intercoms. Unfortunately all but one of the life-rafts had been destroyed. Simultaneously, the intercom poured out an incredible message: the engine rooms were flooding.

Nathan saw Rudolph go into action automatically. He knew what a flood of water in the engine room meant. Time was of the essence. Rudolph opened the high pressure air pipes to the main ballast tanks. The air roared into the tanks with the force of a tornado, expelling the ocean water in a bubbling spray. The entire ferry shook from the inrush of air.

The intercom signal was fading. Instinctively, Calamari pushed his ear near the speaker with a violence that must have made his ear ring, straining to catch any further information from forward and aft. “Ready the one remaining raft,” he
barked. Nathan knew that the order was a formality. The men were already lowering the raft. The captain then turned to an Eskimo junior lieutenant. “Please gather some of the passengers towards the raft.”

Rudolph had connected a radio transmitter to the batteries in the pits, and he tapped out word to the Newfoundland Coast Guard that the ferry was in trouble. He hoped that some of his S.O.S. message would go through despite the broken antenna. Forward and aft, the passengers and crew settled down and waited.

The dwarf Dutch electrician drank a little brandy from a metal flask he carried in his hip pocket. He pulled a photo from his wallet. Nathan conjectured that perhaps now that the man thought death was knocking at his doorstep, he was beginning to wish that he had treated his beautiful wife a little better over the last year, that he had paid more attention to her, and had been a little more loving. Of course Nathan didn't even know whether the man was married, but it seemed reasonable.

It was time for him to return to the coffee shop; Natalie was probably already there. Once they had gotten out into the open air she had felt better, and gone about her business efficiently, checking for lost or injured people, and for signs of the sea spider. Apparently having a definite task to do restored her; it had been the tense inactivity inside that had gotten to her. He hadn't wanted to hamper her; he wasn't a policeman.

The first tiny drops of rain began to patter down on the glass windows of the coffee shop, whose occupants nervously waited for the approach of the pycnogonid. Inside there was little place to hide. Nathan was with them now, but Natalie was still outside on deck somewhere. He tried not to let it bother him too much. And he decided that the direct truth was best, for the people here. “The shaking of the boat was the pressuring of the ballast tanks,” he reported. “But there is something coming.” He looked around, trying to judge how they were taking it. Apparently they were OK; confirmation was better than doubt.

He went to Elmo and Lisa, but they seemed to be all right,
though both were pale. Someone had found them a blanket, and they were huddled together under it.

Bryan was the first to hear a noise beyond the coffee shop door—a slurping wet noise accompanied by scratching. “It reminds me of the noise my mother's garbage disposal made after putting soft garbage inside,” he said. He seemed to have steadied down in the interim, which was a relief, and his analogy seemed apt: that was what it sounded like.

“Can it get through the doors or windows?” Brenda asked. Nathan saw the front of her full blouse quivering rhythmically, and realized that it was echoing her pulse; her heart must be beating like a jackhammer. She reached inside her pocketbook for a tranquilizer to calm her escalating anxiety. After a minute of searching, she gave up. “I took the last pill weeks ago,” she muttered. Instead she began to pace back and forth but stayed very close to her son. That didn't do it, and soon she was back in her chair.

“I checked a window,” Nathan said. “It's inch-thick plate glass. Maybe if we are quiet and don't move, the pycno won't know we're in here.”

Now Nathan had the feeling that he was being watched. He quickly looked toward the windows but saw nothing. His heart skipped a beat because the dark windows reminded him of a row of black dead eyes. The door and windows were filling up with shadows, making his nervousness increase. But until Natalie returned, he had to put on the confident front, so as to keep the others calm.

Suddenly the ferry began to tilt rapidly to stern. Brenda lost her footing as the angle of the ferry reached 30 degrees, and she was propelled from her seat, like a pellet fired from a shotgun. Salt and pepper shakers crashed to the vinyl floor. A quiet Inuit woman held onto a table, but then tumbled to the floor when the table began to slide. Elmo and Lisa were holding onto each other, seeming stable, physically and otherwise.

The steady white noise of the air conditioner suddenly stopped. Water began to pour from the air conditioning vent in
the side of the room, dousing Bill with bitterly cold salt water. Nathan knew what was happening: sea water was coming down the ship's air conditioning system, and the pipes that normally carried air out of the coffee shop to the outer deck were now alive with frothing ocean water.

But understanding it didn't solve the problem. Several hundred gallons of sea water roared into the coffee shop, hitting Brenda full in the face, sweeping her across the floor and bringing her hard against the glass door. Even as the icy water cascaded into the coffee shop they heard some sounds coming from outside.

“It'll stop in a moment!” Nathan cried. “Get out of the flow!”

Brenda's white poodle, dripping with water, laid back her ears and whined. The rush of water slowed to a trickle in a few minutes.

“Mommy, what's out there?” the little boy said. He started to tug nervously on his cartoon T-shirt. Brenda hugged him closer as she shivered in her wet clothes. Water continued to gush, churning up foam that refracted the light from the ceiling bulbs like garlands of silver tinsel.

“Nothing we should worry about,” Brenda said bravely. “Let's read one of your books. How about Dr. Seuss's
Green Eggs and Ham? You
love that Sam-I-Am.”

“How about
The Cat and the Hat?”
said her son.

Nathan continued to gaze at the windows of the coffee shop, trying to shake the feeling that reality was on the verge of slipping out of control. Bill and Bryan followed Nathan's gaze around the periphery of the room.

“OK,” Brenda said as she rummaged nervously in her bag of toys and books. The poodle wedged herself between Brenda and her son.

Bryan carefully stirred the cup of tea in front of him. The sound of the fork bounced off the sides of his cup and grated on Nathan's nerves. But the last thing he wanted to do was set the lumberjack off again, so he ignored it.

Seconds later the sea spider's large proboscis stuck its opening
to a window as if it were searching for food. Right at the pinkish end of the proboscis were little shriveled black lips that pressed and flattened on the glass like two balloons. Green goo poured from the opening and dripped down the plate glass like a river of mucus. Several feet away from the window, Nathan saw the glittering black eyes of the proboscis. One eye swiveled toward Brenda as the incandescent bulbs of the coffee shop threw white rhomboids of light on the dark, shiny orb.

“Ahhh,” Brenda screamed. The boy whimpered like a homesick puppy.

“Shut up,” Bryan said. “It might not know we are in here.”

“Look at that thing,” Bill whispered in a sickened voice.

As if it had overheard them, the pycno stopped moving, then turned slowly toward the plate-glass window and raised its huge sucking appendage in what looked like a slow, sarcastic wave. A whitish-brown vapor poured from the snout; it was the methane by-product of digestion—flatulence—hitting the ice-cold Newfoundland air. Outside thunder boomed and lightning sparked, as if sounding an entry fanfare for the monster.

The large proboscis withdrew from the window, stopped for a few seconds, and then thudded into the glass hard enough to make the whole frame shake. In a moment it repeated the strike.

Thud. Thud.

Bill looked at the window with mounting fear.

The door burst open, startling them all, but it was only Natalie. “The spider's—” she started, then paused as she saw the thing at the window. She tried to smile. “But I see it's already here.”

Nathan went to her and took her hand. “We're OK here, so far. Brenda got soaked by water from the air conditioning vent, but the monster can't get in that way.”

Thud! Thud!

Natalie's hand tightened in Nathan's.

“The window won't stand up to much more of that,” Bill said. Lightning flashed and gave the window the look of a shiny yet gloomy black eye.

?

The banging on the window became louder. Brenda started to scream. She had been doing well, but now was losing it.

“Shut up,” Bryan shouted at Brenda again. The poodle started to bark.

Things were coming unglued, but Nathan didn't know how to stop the process, and it seemed Natalie didn't either. His testicles contracted in fear. Bill slid behind the counter as he looked for some defensive weapon but found only a ketchup bottle. Brenda's mouth opened and closed. For a second, she reminded Nathan of a kissing gourami in an aquarium.

As the banging became louder, Nathan's mind was filled with all the images of the science-fiction films he had watched with his father in his boyhood. Several small shivers ran up his spine.

For a moment, the coffee shop door opened a few inches. Nathan looked at Natalie, then at wide-eyed Brenda, and back at the half-open door, wondering what would happen next. Natalie's grip on his arm became extremely tight. He looked at her, and saw sweat beading her forehead. What was out there?

The thudding on the window had stopped. All was quiet for the moment. Then slowly the coffee shop door opened to its maximum extent. Now they saw the massive, horrible snout, questing, trying to get in. The dooway, however, was too small to permit the proboscis to enter the coffee shop. After a moment it withdrew from the door in a seeming fit of rage.