Peter Benchley's Creature (18 page)

"Every time I see people swimming offshore," Chase said, "I think how lucky it is that they can't see themselves from a couple of hundred feet in the air."

"Why?"

" 'Cause if they saw what swims within ten or fifteen feet of them every few minutes, they'd never set foot in the water again."

"Are there that many sharks?"

"No, not anymore, not the way there used to be. But it doesn't take many to start a panic. It only takes one."

A hundred yards off the beach, a lobsterman was pulling his pots. He cruised up to a buoy, grabbed it with a boat hook and hauled it aboard, fed its rope through a block and tackle suspended from a steel A-frame, wrapped the rope around a winch and brought the wood-and-wire lobster pot up onto his bulwarks.

Chase waved to him, and the lobsterman looked up, began to wave, then noticed the "O.I." stenciled on the side of the big white boat. He aborted his wave, and instead banged one fist into the crook of the other arm and shot Chase the finger.

"How charming," said Amanda.

Chase laughed. "That's Rusty Puckett," he said. "He doesn't like me very much."

"So I see."

"Lobstermen are a strange breed. A lot of them believe the sea is their private preserve, that they've got some God-given right to put traps wherever they want, whenever they want, to catch however much they want, and the rest of the world be damned. Lord help anyone who messes with their traps: they'll sink one another, shoot one another."

"And you messed with his traps?"

"Sort of. Before I owned the island, he used to use it as a camp, a storehouse, a trash dump. He set his pots everywhere, not just in the shallows but in the channel and by the dock. I couldn't get in or out, and kept fouling my propeller in his lines. I asked him to move them, he told me to piss off. I went to the Coast Guard, but they didn't want to get mixed up in it. So one day, Tall Man and I pulled all his pots, emptied them and gave the lobsters to the old folks' home, then reset his pots out here. It took him about two weeks to find them.

"He knows we did it, but he can't prove it, and when he accused us, Tall just said it was a warning from the Great Spirit. Rusty's stupid, but he's not suicidal, he wasn't about to go up against Tall, a giant who feels the same way Rusty does about the law.

"So he left his pots out here, partly 'cause he's too lazy to move them, but partly 'cause the fishing's better out here anyway."

"He should be happy, then."

"You'd think. But Rusty harbors grudges. And he doesn't like it out here. Nothing ever happens, there's no excitement, nobody to get upset with or take a shot at."

They traveled on in silence for a few minutes, then Chase turned and looked aft. Block Island had receded behind them into a shapeless gray mass. He throttled back and took the boat out of gear. "We're here," he said.

"We're where?" Amanda looked around. "I don't see a thing, not a bird, not a fish, nothing but empty ocean."

"Yeah," Chase said, "but I can feel 'em, I can smell 'em, I can practically taste 'em." He grinned. "Can't you?"

"What?"

"Sharks."

22

RUSTY Puckett watched the boat speed away to the east, its white hull seeming to be absorbed by the ocean swells until, at last, all he could see were occasional flashes as the steel superstructure on the flying bridge caught the sun.

Son of a bitch, he thought, I hope you sink, I hope you hit something and go down like a stone. Or maybe catch fire first, then sink. Yeah, fire's good, something nice and nasty about a fire.

Maybe he should go over to the island some night and set fire to something. Teach them a lesson about messing with him. 'Course, they'd likely know he did it, then that fuckin' King Kong of an Indian would be all over him like drool on a baby. He should probably think about it for a while.

He opened the door in the trap balanced on the bulwarks and looked inside. Two lobsters were in the far corner, their antennae waving back and forth. One was a good size, a couple of pounds at least, and Puckett reached in and grabbed it behind the head, avoiding the claws, and pulled it out and dropped it into the box on the deck.

The other was much smaller, probably a "short," a youngster that should be thrown back and allowed to grow for another year or two.

Puckett considered measuring the carapace to confirm that the lobster was a short, but then he thought: Hell, if I don't take it, someone else will. So he pulled the lobster from the trap and, with a single swift twisting motion, tore its tail off and dropped the head, legs and claws—still writhing—overboard, and watched them sink out of sight.

He set the tail on his cutting board. He'd shell it later and sell it for lobster salad. Nobody'd ever be the wiser.

He rebaited the trap, tied the door closed, shoved the trap off the bulwarks and let the rope slide through his hands till it went slack, which told him that the trap was on the bottom. Then he chucked the buoy overboard, put the boat in gear and motored slowly along the line to the next one.

Ten down, ten to go. He already had eighteen "bugs" in the box, he'd likely have thirty or more by the time he was through . . . not bad for a morning's work.

Puckett reached his next buoy, put the boat in neutral, leaned over the side, snagged the buoy and brought it aboard. He fed the rope through the block, wrapped it around the winch and turned the winch on, keeping a hand on the rope to guide it around the drum.

He heard a scream from the shore, and he looked and saw a tall blond girl being chased along the hard-packed sand by what had to be her boyfriend. She was wearing one of those bikini bathing suits that weren't so much a bathing suit as a come-on—what did they call them? Butt floss—and her hooters bounced up and down like two melons.

Nice, he thought. He wouldn't mind having some of that.

The girl suddenly stopped running and turned and kicked sand and water at the boy, and he shouted something and charged at her, but she veered away from him and dove into the water and started swimming.

Come on out here, honeybun, Puckett thought, I'll show you how it's done.

The girl treaded water beyond the wave line, taunting the boy until he dove in and swam to her. Together they breaststroked down the beach, moving swiftly with the tide.

The trap bumped against the bottom of the boat. Puckett shut off the winch and pushed the rope as far out over the side as he could, guiding the trap out from under the boat and up to the surface.

Something was wrong: the trap was hanging at a weird angle, as if one end were much heavier than the other. He leaned on the bulwark and grabbed the trap with both hands and heaved it aboard.

One end of the trap was gone. Splinters of wooden slats hung from pieces of shredded wire.

He looked inside. At first, the trap looked empty— no bait, no lobsters, nothing. Then, as he looked closer, he saw bits of shell and two lobster legs caught in the wire mesh.

What the hell? he thought. A poacher wouldn't do this, he'd do it the easy way: pull the trap, open the door, take the lobsters and toss the trap back. A shark? No, a shark would've beat the trap to pieces, maybe crushed parts of it as he ran away with it.

Puckett unshackled the rope from the shattered trap, pushed the trap overboard and walked aft to fetch a spare. He always carried four spares, because you never knew: traps got stolen, had their ropes cut by propellers, drifted away in storms. He rigged the spare, baited it and shoved it over.

The next trap he hauled was the same, only worse. Two sides were bashed in, and the door was ripped off, gone. Half a dozen lobster antennae were scattered around the bottom of the trap, which meant that there had been at least three lobsters in there. Something had torn them to pieces.

But what?

No octopus would do that to a trap. There were no giant eels around here, no squid big and mean enough.

How about a gigantic lobster? They were cannibals, and a huge enough one might crush a trap.

Gimme a break, he told himself, that lobster'd have to be the size of a goddamn Buick.

Whatever did this was big and strong and either angry or crazy, and it had some kind of tools to work with.

A man. It had to be a man, but what man would want to ...

Chase. Simon Chase.

Sure, it made sense. Why else would Chase have waved when he went by? They weren't exactly bosom buddies. He was sticking it to old Rusty, not content with running him off the island where he'd been lobstering the better part of twenty years, not content with pushing him all the way to hell-and-gone out here, now he wanted to drive Puckett out of business altogether.

Yeah, that wave was the key, the giveaway.

Okay, Mr. Simon
fucking
Chase from your Osprey
fucking
Island
fucking
Institute . . . you want a war, you
got
a war.

Conjuring up a suitable revenge, Puckett replaced the trap and gunned the engine, racing down the line to the next buoy. Chances were, Chase had wrecked all the rest of the traps, but he'd have to pull them all to find out.

Anger returned like an incoming tide as Puckett realized that he had only two more spares, which meant that he'd have to go all the way back to town, collect some more and come all the way out here again.

Anger distracted him as he reached for the next buoy. It should have been floating with the tide, its rope angling downward, but it wasn't; it was bobbing, as if something was tugging on it.

Puckett didn't notice. He hooked the buoy and brought it aboard and wrapped the rope and started the winch.

Immediately, the winch whined, the boat heeled over and the rope began to skid against the drum.

Now
what? Puckett thought. The damn thing must've got itself hitched in the rocks.

No, that wasn't it, couldn't be, because now the rope was grabbing, the winch was bringing it in ... slowly, as if it had a huge weight on it; but it was coming.

Weed. It probably had a hundred pounds of kelp wrapped around it.

He grabbed a six-foot gaff hook and leaned over board, prepared to tear the kelp away before bringing the trap aboard.

Suddenly the boat popped upright and the rope came faster.

Maybe the kelp fell off. Maybe . . .

The trap came into view, a dark shape against the green mist.

There was something beside it, caught in it... no, pushing it... it was whitish, and . . .

Jesus Christ, Puckett thought, it's a body.

But, no, it wasn't a body, and it was swimming, and fast. Its mouth was open, as were its eyes. It had hands—or claws—and they were reaching up at him.

One of the hands grabbed the gaff hook.

Puckett screamed, and tried to pull the gaff hook away, but it was yanked from his hand, and he stumbled backward, still screaming. His shoulder hit the throttle and knocked it forward, into gear, and he fell on it, and the weight of his body pressed it all the way down.

The engine shrieked and the stern sagged as the propeller cavitated and then bit into the water. The boat leaped ahead. The rope whipped off the winch, its coils fell into the water and the buoy caromed off the A-frame and disappeared.

Puckett didn't move until he heard himself screaming. Then he rolled off the throttle and straightened out the wheel.

He kept the boat at full speed, looking aft as if expecting whatever it was to come over the stern and into the cockpit.

When he had traveled perhaps five hundred yards, he throttled back and steered the boat into a wide circle around the buoy. Keeping the engine revs at fifteen hundred, which gave him a constant speed of twelve to fifteen knots, he approached to within a hundred yards of the buoy, and he stared at it. It was floating now, not bobbing, yielding to the pull of the tide.

Puckett's mind was a jumble; thoughts and images and questions ricocheted aimlessly like a ball in a pinball machine.

After a few moments, he felt a chill, then a rush of nausea.

He pushed the throttle forward and headed for home.

From the spot on the beach where they had emerged from the water, the couple watched the boat roar away in a cloud of exhaust.

"I wonder what's the matter with him," the girl said.

"Maybe fouled his prop," said the boy. "I've done that. You want to get home before the shear pin breaks." He looked up and down the beach. "Hey, guess what, we're alone."

"So?"

"So what do you say we go skinny-dipping?"

"You just want to cop a feel," the girl said, smiling.

"I do not."

"Yes, you do. Admit it."

The boy hesitated, then grinned and said, "Okay, I admit it."

The girl reached behind her and pulled a string, and her bra fell away. "See?" she said. "Honesty's the best policy." She pulled a knot at her hip, and the bottom of her suit dropped to the sand. She turned and bounded over the little waves and dove into the water, while the boy struggled to step out of his trunks.

It swam aimlessly over the sand, searching for signs of life.

Though it had no understanding of time, no knowledge that cycles of light and darkness signaled the passage of time, it sensed that the intervals between the maddening urges to kill were growing shorter.

Responding to increased activity, its metabolism, which for years had functioned at a level barely adequate to sustain primitive life, was speeding up, restoring sentience to its brain and burning calories faster and faster.

It heard little movements somewhere ahead, beyond its range of vision, and it followed the sounds until it came upon another of the strange wood-and-wire boxes. There were two small living things inside; it destroyed the box and ate them.

It started down the sand slope into deeper water, when suddenly it sensed motion above. It stopped moving, willed its gills to cease their rhythmic pulsing; it focused the sensitive receptors in the sides of its skull on the source of the pressure changes in the water.

It could not isolate the location, but it did perceive a direction, and so—opening its cavernous mouth, letting its teeth spring forward, flexing its claws—it flew silently toward the prey.

The boy caught up with the girl and, from behind, reached around her and cupped her breasts with his hands.

She shrieked and spun to face him, and raised a hand to slap him. He grabbed her hand and put it around his neck, and leaned forward and kissed her. Clinging to each other, they sank until their heads

dipped underwater, then they parted and surfaced. "How deep is it here?" she asked, gasping for

breath.

"I don't know, fifty feet, maybe more."

"It's creepy, not being able to see the bottom."

"You think something's gonna eat you?" The boy laughed.

"I want to go in."

"Okay."

"Just to where we can touch."

"So let's go." The boy took a couple of strokes toward shore. Then he started, and said, "What was that?"

"What was what?"'

"Something underneath us. Didn't you feel it?"

"Shut up," the girl said. "You're not funny."

"I'm serious. Like a little pressure wave. It's gone now."

"I hate you, Jeffrey . . . you're
not funny."

"I tell you . . ." the boy began, but the girl had
already passed him and was churning the water, swimming toward shore.

It could see them now, far above, two living things— large, weak, awkward.

It swooped upward.

Suddenly it felt itself struck from above, bumped, but not damaged. Disoriented, it whirled around, looking for the thing that had struck it.

At the limit of its vision was something huge, bigger than itself, of a dull color almost indistinguishable from the surrounding water, with fins on its back and its sides. A crescent tail propelled it in a slow circle. Its mouth was ajar; its blank eye stared.

A word for this thing occurred to the creature, a word from the dim past. The word was
Hai
—shark— and with the recognition came a perception of danger. The creature turned with the shark, prepared to defend itself.

The shark flicked its tail and charged head-on, opening its mouth.

The creature dodged, backing up and swerving to the side, and the shark sped by. Immediately it turned and rushed again, and the creature ducked beneath it, reaching up with its claws. The claws found flesh, and slashed it, but the flesh was hard and thick. No blood flowed.