The Squid Slayer

by Jack Heath

  The lobster was tasty—light and faintly sweet. But it was a bit fancy for Sarah. She preferred the chips. They were golden and crispy with big, coarse grains of salt.

  ‘Did you know that a lobster’s teeth are in its stomach?’ Karla said. ‘If you got swallowed by one, you’d survive until you got into its guts, where—’

  ‘No lobster could swallow a person whole,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. They don’t stop growing after fifteen or twenty years like people do. The older they get, the bigger they are. I reckon this one was in his forties. He could have lived to sixty or more—just think how big he would have been then!’

  ‘You wouldn’t have been able to take him home,’ Mum said. ‘Your boat already looks about a kilo and a half away from sinking.’

  ‘Ha, ha. How’s your house going? It looked like it was listing the other day.’

  ‘No leaks. I checked. I think it’s just a weight imbalance.’

  ‘That’s probably what they said about the Quirinus Two,’ Karla muttered.

  ‘I saw the Quirinus Two today,’ Sarah blurted out.

  ‘That must have been the Quirinus Three, darling,’ Mum said. ‘The Quirinus Two sank, don’t you remember?’

  ‘That’s the one I saw,’ Sarah said. ‘Yvette and I spotted it on the bottom of the ocean.’

  Mum looked doubtful, but Karla’s eyes glistened. ‘You did? What was it like?’

  ‘Just like part of the scenery. As though the ocean floor had grown up around it.’

  ‘What about inside?’

  Mum would only worry if she knew Sarah had gone inside. ‘I couldn’t see much through the windows,’ Sarah said.

  ‘You didn’t go inside?’ Karla cried. ‘How could you resist?’

  ‘Because she’s grown up and responsible,’ Mum said.

  Sarah felt a twinge of guilt.

  ‘I thought I saw something nearby though,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’ Karla asked.

  ‘Not exactly sure. But it was as big as a motorbike. Maybe bigger. It had legs and tentacles.’

  Mum rolled her eyes.

  ‘I swear, I’m not kidding. Have you ever seen anything like that around here?’ Sarah asked Karla.

  A strange look clouded Karla’s face. She didn’t reply. She sat, motionless.

  ‘Hello?’ Sarah said. ‘Earth to Karla.’

  Ding! A timer chimed in the kitchen. Karla’s head spun towards the sound so suddenly Sarah was amazed her neck didn’t snap. There was fear in her eyes.

  ‘Are you OK, Karla?’ Mum asked.

  ‘I don’t …’ Karla said. ‘I can’t …’

  Her usually cheery eyes had gone dark. Her whole body was still except for her prosthesis, which was opening and closing like the mouth of a turtle.

  Snap. Snap.

  ‘You should get out of here,’ she said finally.

  ‘You want us to leave?’ Sarah asked, baffled.

  Snap. Snap.

  Karla dabbed her mouth with a napkin, got up, and walked out of the room.

  Sarah and Mum looked at each other.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Mum called out.

  There was no answer.

  ‘I didn’t mean to …’ Sarah whispered, and then she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. She wanted to say hurt her feelings, but that wasn’t quite right.

  Mum shushed her. ‘We’re going, Karla,’ she called out. ‘Thanks very much for having us.’

  Again there was no reply. They stood up and shuffled out the door.

  The dead lobster watched them leave with glassy black eyes.

  THE OCTOPUS’S GARDEN

  ‘Well?’ Mum said, when they were back home and the door was shut.

  ‘I wonder what that was about,’ Sarah said.

  ‘It’s none of our business what it was about,’ Mum said. ‘The point is that you upset her.’

  Sarah gaped. How was it her fault?

  ‘She made us a lovely dinner,’ Mum continued, ‘and then you insulted her by—’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘By making up stories! By talking about tentacled monsters.’

  ‘I wasn’t making it up!’ Sarah cried. ‘It was there!’

  Mum sighed. ‘Sarah. I know it can be hard to predict how people react to things. Sometimes we touch a nerve by accident. But if you’re constantly telling tall tales—’

  ‘Mum, it was real. I saw it. I swear!’ Sarah hated how dishonest she sounded, even though she was telling the truth.

  ‘Maybe you saw a crab tangled up in some seaweed. Or maybe—’

  ‘Crabs don’t get that big,’ Sarah said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you saw or what you think you saw. The point is that Karla is upset, and now you’ll have to do something about it.’

  ‘How?’

  Mum threw up her hands. ‘You think of something. Got it?’

  Sarah pouted. It was so unfair!

  ‘Got it?’ Mum said again.

  ‘Got it,’ Sarah grumbled. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  She didn’t look at her mother as she stomped into her room. She didn’t exactly slam the door, but she didn’t exactly not slam it either.

  Creak.

  Sarah opened her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping, not really. Her head was a swirl of guilt and confusion. She couldn’t stop seeing the look on Karla’s face—faraway but fearful. What had Sarah said to upset her? Throwing them out of the house so abruptly was weird, even for Kooky Karla.

  Creak.

  Sarah rubbed her eyes and clambered out of bed. How was she supposed to sleep with that noise beneath her?

  Beneath her?

  Yes—it wasn’t in the house. It sounded like it was in the hull itself. Perhaps when she and Mum were out, a violent wave had pushed the boat against the dock and cracked the outer layer. Or had something gotten stuck to the underside of the boat?

  Sarah stepped out onto the balcony. Clouds had swept across the moon—she couldn’t see much. Even the lights from the town seemed dimmer.

  She looked down, examining the wood. She couldn’t see any damage.

  But far below, on the ocean floor, there was a shimmering light. Like the glowing headlamp of a gold-miner ghost.

  She hadn’t imagined it. The sea beneath her house was haunted. There was the proof, right below her. She couldn’t wait to tell Yvette tomorrow.

  But Yvette wouldn’t believe her. Sarah clenched her fists. No-one ever believed her. Not Yvette, not Mum, not Uncle Claude, not Karla.

  Her eyes fell on the underwater camera. It wasn’t as good as the camera in her phone, and nothing would show up if she took a photo from up there. But if she dived in …

  ‘Don’t!’

  Sarah yelped and spun around. The man’s voice had been urgent, whispering right in her ear. It had sounded completely real, but the balcony was deserted.

  She remembered the first time she had heard the creaking, and how she had felt the sudden inexplicable urge to flee from the house. Was she going crazy? Or was her brain trying to tell her something important?

  ‘Leave the house, don’t leave the house,’ she grumbled. ‘Make up your mind.’

  It was dark. The water would be freezing cold. And she had promised Yvette she wouldn’t go down there by herself.

  But if she got a picture of the light before it disappeared, she would have the proof that she had been seeking her whole life. Proof that ghosts were real. When she checked the shots later, who knew what she might see?

  And she hadn’t said she wouldn’t dive. She had only promised she wouldn’t go down to the sunken ship. That was a long way from here.

  The light was moving away, bobbing left and right under the shimmering water.

  No more time to ponder.

  It would take too long to put on the scuba tank, but her snorkelling mask was still there from the afternoon. She pulled it on, grabbed the camera, took three deep breaths and threw herself over the
rail, still in her pyjamas.

  Hitting the water was like being shocked with a defibrillator. The chill seeped instantly through her skin and settled in her bones. The warm air above seemed to have done nothing to warm the ocean. Instead it only made the icy water seem colder by comparison.

  It was nothing like diving during the day. Sarah may as well have dived into a vat of tar. She couldn’t see anything at all—

  Until she looked down. There it was, the ghostly blue light, weaving across the ocean floor towards the beach.

  The underwater camera was really just a normal digital camera in a bulky waterproof case. Sarah had dropped it when she jumped in but there was enough air inside to make it float. She splashed around until she found it bobbing on the surface. Then she took another big gulp of air before plunging down into the freezing ocean.

  She snapped a couple of pictures as she swam downwards. She could feel the clacking and whirring of the camera, but couldn’t see the screen. She’d have to wait to see how the pictures turned out.

  The light was getting brighter—or perhaps just closer? It was hard to tell. But Sarah couldn’t see a ghost. Rather than illuminating the surrounding seabed, the glare actually made it harder to see.

  Click. Click.

  If she took enough pictures, some of them were bound to come out.

  Sarah was already starting to feel short of air. The excitement was keeping her heart rate up. She told herself to calm down, but it was impossible. She was getting closer and closer to a real live ghost!

  Well, maybe not live. If she was right, this spirit was someone who had drowned either six years ago in the sunken ship, or a hundred years ago in the gold mines.

  Finally she was close enough to see the headlamp—but it wasn’t a lamp.

  It was a flower.

  A glowing flower as big as her fist, at the bottom of the ocean. It looked like a giant orchid with petals that had absorbed so much moonlight they could now reproduce it. The stem of the orchid led away into the darkness.

  Sarah stared, mesmerised. What was this? Some kind of bizarre coral formation? But they had studied coral in biology just this year, and she’d never heard of it glowing. It was beautiful.

  Sarah reached out to touch the petals.

  The flower shrank back, just out of reach. Wilted and dimmed. Perhaps the movement of her hand in the water had pushed it away. Maybe it was the current, or something else.

  Whatever this was, it wasn’t a ghost. But it was hard to be disappointed when she had found something so strange and amazing.

  Sarah guessed she had about a minute and a half of air in her lungs, but it was too cold to stay down there that long.

  She fumbled with the camera, hoping it had enough space for one last picture. She took aim at the flower and pressed the button.

  The flash lit up the ocean floor—

  And Sarah screamed.

  CREAK!

  Her precious air rushed out of her mouth and fled upwards, as though it were as terrified as she was. The flash had illuminated not only the flower …

  But also the creature it was attached to.

  The sight made no sense. It was as if a nightmare had come to life and crawled its way up into the real world, with all the confusing, dream-like inconsistencies still attached. Overlapping plates of armour. Enormous, serrated claws. A silently snarling mouth inhabited by a gigantic forked tongue.

  The first explanation thrown up by Sarah’s terrified brain was that a scorpion had fallen into the ocean, and soaked up so much water that it had expanded, like a sponge, to the size of a small horse. And then it had eaten an octopus, whose tentacles still protruded from its hideously repulsive face. And that all this had happened in a sunken nuclear submarine, so now the tip of the monster’s tail glowed in the dark. It wasn’t a flower—it was a stinger.

  She thought of the wounds on the beached squid. Teeth marks, scratches and bruises. Scars left by claws and suckers.

  I’ve found the squid slayer, Sarah thought crazily. It’s Cthulhu!

  This thought made no sense—Cthulhu had been hundreds of metres tall, and also wasn’t it fictional?—but that didn’t seem to matter when Sarah was face-to-face with a terrifying sea monster. It must be the same thing she had seen inside the shipwreck. But it was so much more hideous up close. It had lured her down there with the strange light, and now it was going to eat her.

  The thing reared backwards, dazzled by the camera flash. That horrible mouth gnashed, those claws flailed. Sarah saw three milky eyeballs rolling around in their hollow sockets. Perhaps it couldn’t see her. Perhaps she had a chance to get away. But if this thing could take on a colossal squid, what hope did she have?

  She kicked off the ocean floor, stirring up a hurricane of sand as she swam upwards, desperate to get back to the safety of the houseboat. Her lungs were on fire. Her heartbeat was like thunder in her ears.

  When she was halfway to the surface, she looked down to check that the creature hadn’t followed her.

  She found herself staring into its bulbous eyes. It had given chase, and its seething tentacles could almost reach her foot. Its stinger flickered like a bug-zapper behind it.

  Sarah shrieked again, losing the rest of her air. Her empty lungs were in agony. But she was nearly at the surface. She could see the stars through the black water. She paddled desperately upwards—

  And then she saw it.

  The reason she couldn’t go any higher. The reason her house had been creaking. The reason she was doomed.

  Those weren’t stars. Those were glittering stingers.

  The monster chasing her wasn’t alone. The bottom of the houseboat was covered with many more creatures just like it.

  The houseboat itself looked like a giant beast, its underbelly bristling with tentacles.

  The hull swarmed with dozens of the monsters, some even bigger than the one chasing Sarah. They clambered over one another in a tangled mess as if seeking the best spot. Even as Sarah watched, one lost its grip on the shell of another and floated free for a moment before finding purchase on a stray leg.

  Sarah almost fainted. It was partly the lack of air, but mostly raw horror. This explained the creaking sounds, and the way the houseboat had been tilting. These things had been right beneath her while she slept. Her mother was up there now, oblivious. And Sarah would have no chance to warn her—her terrified, oxygen-starved brain was about to shut down, leaving her to drown or get eaten by monsters, or both.

  If she kept swimming up towards the houseboat, the swarm would devour her. If she didn’t, the monster beneath would catch up. Even worse, one of the creatures above had now spotted her. It detached itself from the houseboat and launched itself downwards, the tentacles around its mouth squirming.

  Her vision was going grey. She was going to black out. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe!

  And then she thought she heard a single whispered word: Camera.

  The camera was still on a strap around her neck. Only one way out. One chance. Sarah grabbed it, took aim and snapped a photo downwards.

  The flash lit up the ocean. The beast thrashed in the water, blinded again. It swiped at her legs with its claws, and missed.

  Sarah turned the camera upwards, and pushed the button again. Flash! The creature above snarled silently as its alien eyes were dazzled.

  Sarah swam out of the way just in time. The two blinded monsters crashed into one another and immediately began tearing each other apart. One bit down on the other’s leg, cleaving through the joint. In retaliation, the wounded beast sliced the tentacles off the other’s face with a razor-sharp claw. A cloud of black blood bloomed around them, like a gathering storm.

  Sarah unscrewed part of the camera’s airtight casing. Water poured in, ruining the camera—but precious air bubbled out. Sarah put her lips over the hole and sucked the oxygen into her lungs.

  It wasn’t much. But it might be enough to get her to the surface. She swam desperately, sideways and u
pwards, hoping to emerge out of the swarm’s reach. The roaring of the waves got louder and louder and—

  Her head burst into the open air. She inhaled so suddenly and so hungrily that her lungs made a sound like a whooping bird. She coughed, spluttered, inhaled again.

  She had made it.

  She wasn’t dead.

  And then something touched her foot, and she quickly got moving again.

  The nearest ladder was just beyond her grasp. She splashed towards it, knowing that the ocean beneath her was full of demons and at any moment one of them could bite down on her leg.

  But they didn’t. She made it to the bottom rung and scrambled up the ladder like a cat up a tree. When she got to the top, she dragged herself onto the jetty and crawled away from the ladder as fast as she could. Sharks, dolphins and other creatures could leap out of the water to catch their prey—who knew what these creatures could do?

  The water lapped gently at the pylons under the pier. Nothing jumped out of it. No claws reached up to grab her. She was safe.

  But Mum wasn’t. She was alone in that creaking boat, metres away from a horde of monsters and not even knowing it.

  Sarah hauled herself to her feet and ran towards the houseboat. ‘Mum!’ she shouted. Her voice came out strangled and hoarse. ‘Mum!’

  There was no reply from within. The houseboat rocked gently from side to side as the hive seethed beneath it.

  ‘Mum!’ It was no use. She could still barely breathe, let alone shout.

  Knowing the sea monsters were down there, it took all the courage Sarah had to step onto the gangplank and run up to the front door. The handle wouldn’t turn. She had to remove the combination lock from the letterbox and get the spare key out. Her frozen, fumbling fingers barely got the job done.

  When she was inside, everything looked so normal that for a moment she suspected she had dreamed the whole thing.

  But she was cold and wet from her scalp to her toes. She wasn’t imagining that. She had to get her mother out of there right now.

  A fit of explosive coughs bent her in half. Sea water spattered the floor. When she recovered, there was still no sound from the rest of the house.