The Squid Slayer

by Jack Heath

  She jammed the key into the lock and twisted. She’d stopped noticing how fake the door felt. Like everything else in the house, it was lighter than it looked. The handle looked like metal, but it was plastic. A floating house couldn’t afford any unnecessary weight.

  ‘Hi, Mum!’ she shouted.

  Mum’s head appeared from the kitchen doorway. ‘Hey, sweetie!’ she said. ‘You’re home just in time. How was your day?’

  ‘Dramatic,’ Sarah said. ‘Yvette and I went ghost hunting …’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘… and we saw a guy with a bomb …’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘… and I nearly got eaten by a giant squid! Sorry, I mean a colossal squid.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Could you set the table?’

  ‘Mum, are you even listening?’

  ‘You went ghost hunting, you saw a bomb and you nearly got eaten by a squid.’

  ‘It’s all true,’ Sarah grumbled.

  ‘No doubt. Get out some plates! I’ve been cooking all afternoon.’

  That was probably a joke. The closest Mum ever got to cooking was microwaving leftover takeaway food.

  Sure enough, once Sarah had set the table Mum brought out a plastic container filled with the same garlic noodles they had eaten last night.

  Sarah didn’t mind. They had been yummy yesterday and they would be yummy today. She spooned some onto her plate and attacked them with chopsticks.

  Mum was a willowy woman with dark skin, thick eyebrows and very short hair. Her brother, Claude, was pale and stocky. This had never struck Sarah as strange until other people started commenting on it. Later she found out that Mum had been adopted as a baby by Uncle Claude’s parents.

  When people found out, they always asked Sarah how much she knew about her biological grandparents. The answer was very little, but she didn’t think about them much.

  She thought about her father more. He had passed away when she was a lot younger, but the walls of the house were decorated with so many framed pictures of him—a man with a thin moustache and crooked teeth—that it was hard for Sarah to sort the real memories from the images. Had she really been at the park that day? Or had she just seen the picture of Mum and Dad there? She didn’t know for sure.

  If she was being honest, she didn’t miss her dad as much as her mum—the happier version of her from before Dad died.

  ‘So, what’s on tomorrow?’ Mum asked. ‘Are you going to join a crew of pirates and sail the seven seas?’

  ‘I don’t want to rule anything out,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Well, it’s a school day, so try to hold off on any piracy until at least four o’clock.’

  ‘Deal. What about you?’

  ‘Well,’ Mum said, ‘tomorrow I have to get up early. One of our clients is going to Sweden. I need to call some people over there to book her a ticket on the overnight cruise from Finland. At least I should get home around three-ish.’

  Mum ran a travel agency in Axe Falls. It was small, but very popular. That was an unexpected advantage of living in a town that everyone was always desperate to leave behind.

  Not Sarah, though. She loved living in a town with a story around every corner, especially if it was scary sometimes.

  ‘Want to watch a movie tonight?’ Mum asked.

  The TV was tiny and the couch creaked, but just the same, Sarah loved movie nights with Mum. Dad had left behind an enormous collection of DVDs. Mum had already seen most of them, but she didn’t mind watching them again with Sarah.

  ‘That’s what parenthood is like,’ she had once told Sarah. ‘Watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times, but enjoying it because there’s someone new to share it with.’

  It had never occurred to Sarah that watching Dad’s movies might be painful for her mother, even after all this time.

  ‘Well?’ Mum said. ‘Movie, or no movie?’

  Sarah smiled. ‘Only if it’s a scary one.’

  ‘Agreed. I’ll put on my chef’s hat,’ Mum said, ‘and whip up some microwave popcorn.’

  STRANGE LIGHTS BENEATH

  Sarah wasn’t sure what had awakened her.

  Perhaps nothing.

  It was still dark. Her thin purple curtains swayed in the ocean breeze, leaving shimmering shadows on the ceiling. Plush toys grinned down at her from the shelves, stuffing escaping from holes in their patchy fur. Their golden eyes shone like those of the colossal squid.

  The house tilted gently on the swells. Sarah was used to that now—it was like being rocked to sleep as a baby. Whenever she stayed the night at Yvette’s place, she couldn’t relax. It was hard to balance with the floor so rigid beneath the bed.

  Her eyes started to flutter closed again.

  Creak.

  There it was again. A sound like someone very carefully descending a staircase.

  But the houseboat didn’t have any stairs.

  ‘Mum?’ Sarah yawned. ‘Is that you?’

  There was no response.

  Maybe Mum was sleepwalking. Sarah fumbled around the bedside table until she found her phone and checked the time. The numbers were painfully bright in the darkness: 2:42 AM.

  Sarah groaned. She would be positively wrecked at school tomorrow—or rather, today.

  Creak.

  The noise seemed to come from right outside her bedroom door.

  Sarah sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘Mum?’

  Silence.

  Sarah stood, lifted her dressing-gown off a hook behind the door and wrapped it around her shoulders. She reached for the doorhandle. Hesitated.

  A tingling grew at the back of her skull. Dread welled up in her belly. She had the sudden urge to get out of the house, get out, get out, right now!

  She whirled around. The need to leave was so sudden, so strong that it was almost as if someone else was in the bedroom with her, whispering advice in her ear. But the room was empty.

  Sarah shivered, shaking off the sensation. It would only take her a minute to see what Mum was up to.

  She pulled the door open.

  Darkness there, and nothing more. No sleepwalker, no serial killer, no rotting zombie. The living area was empty.

  She found Mum almost immediately. She had left her bedroom door open and was facedown amid the rumpled covers, snoring gently.

  Was someone else in the house? Sarah thought it unlikely. Who would break into a houseboat which was clearly occupied—and, to be honest, noticeably older and cheaper than the ones around it?

  So there was no need to wake Mum. It was probably just the walls shrinking in the cold.

  Still. She wouldn’t be able to sleep without checking the whole house. So she did, room by room.

  No-one in the kitchen. No-one in the bathroom. No-one in any of the cupboards or closets or wardrobes.

  Sarah froze when a fallen bud of popcorn crunched under her foot. But there was no sign that anyone had heard the sound, or that anyone was there to hear it.

  Only one place left to check—the rear balcony. Sarah unlatched the glass door and rolled it aside as quietly as she could. As always, she was surprised by how loud the sea was—the heaving, the hissing, the roaring. The black ocean wasn’t especially wild tonight, but seeing it somehow let Sarah hear all the noises she had been ignoring.

  A wetsuit and a couple of scuba tanks lay next to the electric barbecue. Other than that, the balcony was empty. Sarah was alone but for the sparkling stars.

  She was about to return to bed when she saw the light in the water.

  At first she thought it was a reflection from the lighthouse up on the hill, which had been refurbished and brightened after the shipwreck six years ago. But the glow was actually coming from beneath the water. It looked like it was a long way down.

  A fallen torch, perhaps? No—it was moving. Swaying gently and edging ever closer to the docked houseboat.

  It looked not unlike the headlamp of the man who had chased her out of the cave that morning.

  The story flashed through Sarah’s
head. Flooded caves. Drowned gold miners. Ghosts.

  Could some of the restless spirits have been washed out to sea?

  She gripped the rail and peered down into the water. The illumination was definitely there. In fact, if anything, it seemed to have gotten brighter. As though someone was standing on the ocean floor right beneath the houseboat, and had turned the headlamp up to shine it at her.

  The idea that this might be a trick of the light evaporated. Sarah had the immediate sense that she was being looked at. More than that—she was being examined.

  Was it possible? Could there really be a ghost wandering on the seabed?

  Sarah looked at the light for a long moment and felt it look back at her. It seemed to be waiting for something.

  Creak.

  This time the noise was right behind her on the balcony. Sarah felt cold breath on the back of her neck.

  She whirled around. A silhouette loomed in the doorway, taller and broader than Sarah, blocking her entrance to the houseboat.

  She stumbled backwards against the safety rail. She should have known that the ghost wouldn’t travel alone. It would distract her while a fellow spirit rose up through the floor behind.

  The apparition reached out with a long-fingered hand. ‘Sarah …’

  The whispered word sent chills up her spine. She gripped the railing behind her.

  ‘I mean you no harm,’ Sarah stammered.

  ‘What? What’s going on?’

  Sarah blinked. She knew that voice.

  As the ghost stepped closer, the moonlight fell on its face. It was just Mum, wearing a fluffy wool cardigan over her satin pyjamas. Dark circles hung beneath her eyes. Her hair was smeared upwards on one side of her head.

  ‘Mum!’ Sarah gasped. ‘You scared me!’

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ Mum asked. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘There’s a ghost!’ Sarah pointed. ‘In the water! I have to go down there.’

  ‘Go down where? What are you talking about?’ Sarah was already shrugging off her dressing-gown and stepping into the wetsuit. ‘Strange lights,’ she said, ‘on the seabed … I think it’s haunted! You know, by the gold miners who drowned.’

  Mum probably couldn’t figure out what she was saying—but she knew Sarah was talking about diving in. She put a hand on Sarah’s arm.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘It’s the middle of the night!’

  ‘Are you kidding? How often do you get the chance to see a real live ghost?’ Sarah hesitated. ‘Well, not “live”, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘You claim to have that opportunity every other week,’ Mum said dryly. ‘And if this is what happens when you watch a scary movie before bed—’

  ‘I’m not imagining this, Mum! Look!’

  Mum peered over the edge and stared down into the water. ‘I don’t see anything.’

  ‘It’s right …’ Sarah searched the water. The strange light had winked out.

  ‘It was just a dream, honey,’ Mum said.

  ‘But it was there. I saw it.’

  ‘Maybe it was phosphorescence or something. But either way, take that wetsuit off.’

  ‘Are you crazy? I’ll freeze!’

  Even in summer, the ocean was cold at night.

  Mum rolled her eyes. ‘I meant take off the suit and come inside.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sarah stared at the water. It did look very cold. And there was still no sign of the light.

  ‘OK,’ she sighed as she started peeling off the wetsuit.

  Mum ruffled her hair. ‘That’s my girl. Fancy a hot chocolate to help you get back to sleep?’

  Sarah often found that chocolate actually kept her awake—but she wasn’t about to turn it down.

  ‘Sure, I guess,’ she mumbled.

  ASLEEP FOR CENTURIES

  Axe Falls High School was made of black stones, wrought-iron fences and withered, leafless trees. It looked a little like a medieval castle. The first time Sarah pointed this out, someone told her it had actually been a psychiatric hospital—back when psychiatric hospitals were called lunatic asylums. Sarah supposed it might have been a castle before that. Perhaps vampires slept in coffins in the basement, and princesses were walled in at the top of the watchtower.

  She rubbed her eyes. It might have been the hot chocolate, or maybe it was the excitement, but she hadn’t slept at all after seeing the strange light in the ocean. Now she was running at thirty per cent brain power, tops. Hopefully today wouldn’t be too taxing.

  She planned to sit on each teacher’s left-hand side and take a nap. She’d noticed that most teachers tended to pay more attention to the kids on their right. Perhaps because most of them were right-handed? And, of course, there was Mr Eyrie’s lazy left eye—

  ‘Hey, Sarah.’ Yvette was on her knees amongst the bike racks. Her bike appeared to be in three separate pieces. Her hands were smeared with grease.

  ‘What happened?’ Sarah asked as she approached.

  ‘Beats me. The gears were making this weird clicking sound. Which they shouldn’t, because I tuned them up yesterday.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because you tuned them up yesterday.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ Yvette grumbled.

  ‘Anyone can make a mistake.’ Sarah didn’t point out that Yvette had recently destroyed a food-tech classroom with a faulty pressure washer.

  Yvette opened her mouth, but Dale spared Sarah from an argument by showing up with a guitar amp under his arm and a bruise under his chin.

  ‘Hey, cuz,’ Sarah said. ‘Hurt yourself shaving?’

  ‘Ha, ha. I fell off my surfboard.’

  ‘You mean you fell on it?’

  ‘I fell on it, then I fell off it. What’s Yvette done to her bike?’

  ‘Tuned it up,’ Sarah said, deadpan.

  ‘Better tune it back down again, or you won’t be able to get home.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Yvette muttered.

  Dale slapped Sarah on the arm. ‘Hey. Dad had a message for you.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘He said …’ Dale cleared his throat and launched into a passable impression of Claude. ‘“Tell Sarah a demolitions crew is re-routing the Axe Falls River. If they don’t, the town might get flooded because of erosion.”‘

  ‘Oh.’ Sarah knew about the erosion threat—the waterfall was gradually working its way inland towards the town. ‘Re-routing a river sounds like a big deal. How come we haven’t heard about that?’

  ‘I asked the same question. Apparently the government originally promised not to do it. Now that they’ve changed their minds, they’re trying to keep it quiet. Even Dad didn’t know until he did some digging around. Why were you asking him about it?’

  ‘Because Yvette and I thought we saw a ghost—’

  ‘You thought it was a ghost,’ Yvette said.

  ‘And then we thought it might have been someone up to no good, so we asked your dad to look into it. Sounds like it was just a guy with a bomb.’

  ‘Who may or may not screw up and drown us all,’ Dale said. ‘Much less scary.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’re going to be late for class.’

  Yvette’s bike was still in three pieces. ‘You’re going to need two more bike locks,’ Sarah told her.

  ‘Nah,’ Yvette said. ‘I can thread one chain through all the bits.’

  ‘That’s pretty smart,’ Dale said. ‘Where was that insight when you decided to break your bike in the first place?’

  Sarah failed to stifle a laugh. Yvette glared at them both, fastened the chain to her disassembled bike, and followed them in to the school.

  Sarah and Yvette’s first class was English. Their teacher was a wispy young woman named Mrs Abercrombie. Her skin was always deathly pale, her cheeks hollow—it had taken Sarah two weeks of lessons to convince herself that her teacher wasn’t gravely ill. Her hair was as black and shiny as an oil slick. Sarah called her Mrs Aberzombie.

  ‘Come on in, sit down,’ the teacher said. Her voice, as
always, was flat and croaky. Her bulging eyes scanned each student without blinking. ‘I have marked your essays on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. You’ll be thrilled to hear that most of you passed.’

  She always insisted on using the full title for everything. Sarah thought she might be much older than she looked. Perhaps she came from a time when inappropriate title-shortening could get you whipped, or hung. Yvette said she was just trying to pad out the lessons.

  ‘You can pick up your essays at the end of class,’ Mrs Aberzombie continued. ‘It’s time to start studying a new text. I have selected a tale by Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu.’

  The kids looked blankly at one another.

  ‘The call of the fool who what?’ someone asked.

  ‘Cthulhu,’ Mrs Aberzombie corrected, ‘pronounced ke-thoo-loo. And I chose it in honour of our new arrival.’

  ‘Who’s the new arrival?’ a blond kid named Ryan called out from up the back.

  Mrs Aberzombie smiled, showing unnaturally sharp teeth. ‘The colossal squid, of course.’ She turned her colourless eyes to Sarah. ‘I gather you two had a close encounter yesterday.’

  Sarah shuddered. She had been looking forward to telling the story—in her version she would be fearless and quick-thinking, ready to punch the squid’s ugly tongue as soon as it came within reach—but being singled out by the teacher somehow made it scary again. She could almost feel the creature’s slimy tentacle wrapped around her ankles. She could still see that evil yellow eye, smell that sour breath.

  If Mrs Aberzombie noticed that she had made Sarah uncomfortable, she didn’t show it. ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ she said, ‘is a 1928 short story—’

  ‘Yes!’ Ryan hissed. In his view, shorter was better. He had once told Sarah he hated reading—proudly, as though he were trying to impress her. But when she quizzed him, it turned out he’d only ever tried to read one book. He had read half of the first chapter of an unauthorised biography of his favourite band, Paint Rocket, and then given up.