Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  SPEARGUN

  Click … click … click …

  The sound of tiny hermit crabs lugging their adopted shells as they clambered over bits of broken coral that littered the shoreline greeted the skin divers who were wading with masks, snorkels, and fins into the tepid aquamarine waters. Were it not for the blistering heat of the sun on the sole-scorching sand, entering the lagoon might have felt like stepping into a bathtub. But with more sweat trickling down their bodies than would be sucked out by a sauna, the cooling dip evoked a collective “Aaah!” from the Odyssey group.

  “That looks nasty,” Yvette said.

  “What?” asked Zinc.

  “The scar near your spine. How’d it happen?”

  “I was stabbed in the back.”

  “Who stabbed you?”

  “Some psycho on Deadman’s Island.”

  “An inch more to the side and he’d have finished the job.”

  “I’m sure he’d still like to.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Locked away in a psych ward on Colony Farm.”

  “Good riddance.”

  “I’ll say.”

  From the corner of his eye, Zinc kept a bead on Grimmer. As he watched the spear fisherman arm the gun by ramming a barbed shaft down the barrel, he also saw Bret Lister bend at the waist and scoop both hands into the lagoon. The older lawyer was a few feet in front of the younger, who had paused to prepare his weapon for action. In Bret’s fist was a slug-like creature known locally as a matu rori, a sea cucumber. Slippery and slimy, it resembled the guts of a snail. Lister tore the skin open and squeezed out the innards as if they were toothpaste in a tube. Then he threw back his head to drop the spaghetti entrails into his mouth, and with a gulp of gourmet’s relish, he tossed the black skin away.

  “Hey, mana man,” he said, scooping up another and holding it out to Grimmer. “I dare you.”

  “Bon appétit,” Wes said. “They’re your bowels, Bret. But I’m not a bottom feeder.”

  “We’ll see,” Lister sneered as he waded back to shore.

  For easy visibility during a masked dive, Yvette had strapped a sheathed diver’s knife—serrated along one edge and razor sharp on the other—to the inside of her left calf, opposite her dominant hand. Zinc wished in hindsight that he had armed himself on Rarotonga as planned, but catching up to the Odyssey had moved things along at too fast a pace. As Wes had warned the Mountie back on the beach, you never know what dangers lurk beyond the reef … and Zinc’s concern as he and Yvette prepared to swim out to sea was that the greatest of those possible dangers might turn out to be Wes himself.

  Using the water to buoy him up, Zinc pulled on full-foot flippers. Just before Yvette lowered her mask of tempered glass and stuck the J-shaped tube of the snorkel into her mouth, she cocked a finger at Zinc and said, “Should I insist that you swim ahead of me?”

  “So you can look up my trunks?”

  “So you can’t look up mine.”

  “I’d say Bill Pigeon is more of a threat.” Zinc nodded toward the lawyer in the hibiscus-patterned trunks who was sneaking a surreptitious peek at the goth queen’s breasts each time her head was turned.

  “He’ll stick with Petra,” Yvette said knowingly. “Water magnifies peeping vistas.”

  “Gee, maybe I should stick with Petra too.”

  “It’s your choice, Zinc. But if you do, that will kill your chances of ever seeing my tattoo.”

  And with that, she stuck the snorkel into her pursed mouth and dove cleanly into the wavering mirage of Neptune’s turquoise realm, the color of which changed constantly according to the angle of refraction of the sun’s beams. Beneath the dazzling sparkles that glinted off the surface, and above the glistening white sand that carpeted the bottom of the shimmering lagoon, Yvette’s lithe figure scissor-kicked toward the beckoning reef.

  From the corner of his eye, Zinc saw Wes dive in.

  Splash!

  Zinc got wet too.

  To dive in the South Pacific is to enter a different dimension. The tunnel vision of your face mask opens up a view into an alien world teeming with exotic creatures. As Zinc followed Yvette’s flapping fins out to the barrier reef, he watched reality slipping further and further away from him. At first there was just his shadow on the pristine sand, which was dotted here and there with the sea slugs that Bret found delectable. Then clumps of phosphorescent coral came into view, around which swirled halos of brightly colored tropical fish. As the living corals fused together to fashion intricate ridges, caves, canyons, and shelves, the sandbars sandwiched between the underwater gardens shrank. Yvette appeared to have discovered a trough through the coral barrier, a gap that flowed over the submerged ramparts and out to the open sea. As the Mountie caught up to his siren at the far edge of the reef, she bent at the waist for a tuck dive and threw her legs straight up in the air so the weight of her lower limbs would drive her body underwater.

  Down she dove into Davy Jones’s locker.

  Viz, divers call it, for “average underwater visibility.” Today, that viz was exceptional: up to two hundred feet. For the first few seconds that Zinc gazed down into plunging infinity, he was seized with a giddy sensation of vertigo. It was as if Wells’s time machine had transported him back to the birth of life on earth in some primordial volcanic soup. The drop-off from the rim was layered like an archeological dig, with new generations of the ever-evolving reef tiered upon the foundations of those laid down before. The solid, big-knuckled corals that buttressed the top of the wall swarmed with the shimmering colors and flamboyant patterns of a mind-boggling palette of abundant fish that slashed through pools of trembling light amid ominous shadows.

  The deeper he looked, the more Zinc fathomed.

  This coral wasn’t just coral. It comprised a multitude of shapes. He spied brain coral, mushroom coral, grape coral, plate coral, and shelving coral. The bright, sulfur-yellow ones with smooth surfaces were stinging coral. Interspersed with the limestone heads were the vacuum cleaners of the sea: water-filtering sponges. The fish flitting around the reef were of such myriad species that they had evolved colors and designs for sexual recognition. To mate takes joining up with a genetic partner, and if your pattern doubles as camouflage to hide you from predators, so much the better. So here, passing in front of his mask, Zinc saw butterfly fish, goatfish, angelfish, damselfish, and unicorn fish flash by as electric spectrums. He saw lionfish with orange and white stripes, their fins tipped with poisonous spines. He saw triggerfish with “attitude” that tried to scare him off. He saw parrotfish with beak-like teeth that chewed up hard coral to get at the delicate polyps within, venting the waste through their anuses as a shower of sand. It made him wonder why everything was named for something else, then he realized that was because such reefs were truly an alien realm.

  You compare to what you know.

  Including unicorns.

  The monsters of the deep began down where Yvette was exploring the drop-off. Red sea whips and fans called gorgonians after the Gorgon, a snake-haired monster of Greek mythology, swayed in the currents that buffeted the coral wall. Giant clams with their wavy lips agape to reveal blue insides seemed poised to gobble her up. The tentacles of an octopus undulated in a hidey-hole, beneath the jutting ledge of which a school of purple-and-yellow fairy basslets swam upside down. Protruding from the crevice below that, its head weaving back and forth like a cobra’s, its jaws hinged wide to expose rows of sharp needlelike teeth, a moray eel sought an opportunity to sink its fangs into something. When it went for the eye of a nearby fish to clamp onto what should have been its head, the prey got away because its tail was patterned with a false eyespot, its real eye masked by a dark band at the other end.

  As Yvette was coming up for air, Zinc espied pelagics—open-ocean creatures—in the depths beneath her.

  A large green sea turtle gnawed on a sponge.

  Other deep-water denizens pulled up along the reef like cars at a service station for work by “
cleaner fish,” the tiny parasites that feed off others’ scale detritus.

  Way down under at a hundred feet or more, a graceful manta ray slipped like a stealth bomber through the blue abyss by slow, rubbery beats of its broad wings.

  And deeper down, where the viz faded into shadows, there slipped what might be a shiver of reef sharks.

  Well, well, wondered Zinc. What do we have here?

  For as his eyes followed Yvette up the face of the underwater cliff, the Mountie caught sight of a graveyard of dead coral. All that remained of what had recently been a colony of colorful polyps were the bleached bones of their limestone skeletons. In a twist of irony, the polyps in this coral reef were falling prey to a nocturnal raider with the same name as Bret Lister’s newest book: a crown of thorns. Hiding among the rock nooks until it ventured out tonight was the purple starfish, two feet across, with thirteen to sixteen arms—Zinc couldn’t see them all to count—its top side prickled with short, sharp, toxic spines.

  The depths in front of the Mountie’s mask were suddenly suffused with the shade of blood, until both the crown of thorns feeding off this reef and Yvette, nearing the surface, were submerged in a red sea.

  Blood?

  Sharks …

  The cop craned his neck around.

  Several feet behind Zinc, the terrified gaze of Miles Yeager stared out from the window of his face mask, air bubbles leaking from the seals around his quivering lips, blood pumping out from the puncture wound in his chest, which had been caused by the steel speargun shaft that was rammed spine to sternum through his heaving torso.

  Yeager went into spasms.

  Blood …

  Sharks …

  Thrashing!

  Get out of the water! thought Zinc.

  Like a whale spewing out through its blowhole, Yvette blasted the brine from her snorkel as she broke to the surface. Tearing the tube from her mouth as Zinc did the same, she yelled, “What happened? He’s been speared!”

  “Did you see any sharks?”

  “Sharks!”

  “Beneath you on the dive?”

  “No.”

  The blast of another snorkel-clearing blew skyward from the water beyond the speared man. Wes Grimmer surfaced just inside the turquoise edge of the lagoon and yelled across the pool of blood that reddened the gap in the reef.

  “Did you see that? Bret’s mad! The fucker tried to kill me! That spear he fired missed by inches.”

  “Missed you,” Zinc shouted back, “but it hit Yeager. Help me get him out of the water before he’s shark bait.”

  “Sharks! You see sharks?”

  But the Mountie was already swimming.

  Soon, a gory streak of blood stained the idyllic powder-white sand of the nearest motu as Zinc, Wes, and Yvette hauled Yeager ashore.

  The skewered man’s mouth gaped like that of a fish out of water. Each gulp of air bubbled blood around the spear shaft that had been driven through his lung. The spearhead that tipped the missile rod spiking out of Yeager’s chest was a wicked one known as a Tahitian, with a “flopper” barb: the hinged barb hugged the shaft as it rammed through, then flopped wide so there was no struggling free. Normally, a shaft was strung to its speargun with a line, but this one was free to go with anything it hit because the shooter didn’t want to reel in his catch.

  This was for blood sport, not for food.

  As Yvette and Wes saw to the dying man, Zinc stood on the beach and skimmed the glassy lagoon to get a fix on where Lister was from his snorkel. Facing him on the opposite shore were the Eyes of Tangaroa, those side-by-side caves burrowed into the makatea cliff on both flanks of the nose between that was Marae O Rongo. Rising out of the lagoon as the tide ebbed toward the sea was a sandbar in the shallows. Her back to the reef and unaware of the drama, Petra surfaced and waded from the water onto the hump of sand. And sure enough, on the heels of the bathing beauty, Bill Pigeon splashed out of the lagoon like a faithful dog.

  Then …

  “Look out!” Zinc yelled.

  Bret Lister surfaced waist-deep in the shallows behind them like the Creature from the Blue Lagoon to let loose another spear that skewered Pigeon in the back.

  As Petra swiveled in response to Zinc’s warning, the speared man clutched hold of her in a futile attempt to stand fast on his buckling legs. Clinging desperately to her, the lawyer let out the sort of squeal you’d hear from a stuck pig and dragged Petra down with him as he crumpled to the sand.

  Now Bret was out of the water and approaching the sprawled pair. As Petra looked up from beneath the burden of the mauling lawyer, Bret seemed to smash the back end of the gun down on her head. Zinc didn’t see the blow hit because Bret blocked his view, but Petra’s feet ceased digging into the sand as soon as the weapon descended.

  Then Bret pulled a diver’s knife.

  Moments after he had bent over and slashed at the sand, then sawed back and forth several times, Bret straightened up with Pigeon’s severed head in his hand. Holding it out toward the idol erected on the marae like Cook Islands cannibals used to do with their sacrifices to the elder gods, the psycho gouged one of the eyes out of its socket with his bloody knife.

  “Rongo!” Bret offered in a voice loud enough to conjure that god from the invisible realm.

  Throwing back his head, Lister gulped the eye down his gullet like Rongomatane had done.

  “Rongo!” he summoned.

  And gouged out the other eye.

  And gobbled it.

  Then—the hair of the severed head and the speargun gripped in his other hand—Bret grabbed hold of Petra by one arm and began to drag her toward the Eyes of Tangaroa.

  BLEEDING BAIT

  Petra’s role in all of this was still unclear.

  If she was a killer, then Bret’s turning on her might be rough justice. But if she wasn’t …

  The Mountie had to act.

  Staunching the blood flow from Miles Yeager’s wound necessitated the removal of the spear from his torso. Wes had laid down his speargun and was busy unscrewing the Tahitian barb at the front end of the steel rod so the shaft could be extracted. Commandeering the weapon from the sand, Zinc splashed back into the lagoon as quickly as the fins flapping on his feet would allow, then, getting wet again, he headed for the sandbar that humped from the sea.

  Keeping the fins underwater so they didn’t break the surface, Zinc kicked from the hip for sleek propulsion. His arms were of no use in this torpedo run, so they hugged his streamlined sides, with one hand trailing the pneumatic gun. Several times, the Mountie bobbed his maskless face to see where he was going, and as soon as his chest hit the sandbar like that of a beached whale, he rolled over on his back, sat up in the shallows, yanked the fins from his feet and scrambled ashore.

  Bill Pigeon’s headless corpse lay sprawled on a stretch of churned sand that crested the hump that was rising out of the ebbing waters of the sun-drenched lagoon. The saturated red sand had soaked up his blood as fast as his heart had gushed it out. A trail of blood from the severed head Zinc had seen in Lister’s grasp ran up the isthmus linking the sandbar to the island’s permanent shore. Parallel to the drips that drained from the lawyer’s brainpan were a set of footprints impressed by the psycho’s soles and ragged drag marks gouged out of the sand by Petra’s heels.

  The spoor led the cop to a patch of coconut palms near the marae, where Bret’s gear was piled with that of the others on the Odyssey. Footprints turned to shoeprints at that point, so Bret had shod himself before venturing on. The gout of blood that stained the spot where he had set the severed head down on the sand was now overrun by an army of red ants. Zinc rummaged through his own gear to retrieve a pair of shoes.

  From the shade, the tracks led Zinc to the cave that sank into the makatea as the right Eye of Tangaroa. There, the prints, the drips, and the drag marks were swallowed up by the darkness in the deep throat of the yawning mouth. With runners now on his feet, a flashlight in one hand, and Wes’s armed speargun in the other,
the Mountie pursued the psycho into the Morlocks’s wormhole.

  Crouching to make himself as condensed a target as possible, Zinc scurried into the entrance zone of the beach cave. Backlit by the brilliant glare of tropical sunlight striking and reflecting off the lagoon, the round mouth was a shooting gallery with him as the only duck. Fully expecting a spear to come flying out at him from the dark gullet of the huge cavern beyond the hole, Zinc darted in around the side edge of the coral lips to seek refuge in the shadows.

  No spear.

  Nothing.

  So he let his eyes adjust.

  Like photographic paper developing a hidden picture, the contours of this subterranean vault slowly materialized. Stalactite is a Greek word for “oozing out in drops.” All stalactites begin as “soda straws,” like the cluster of dripstones hanging above Zinc’s head and raining drops down on him.

  On gazing up, it seemed to Zinc as if the world hung upside down, as if the soda straws were an inverted bed of nails. On gazing down, the Mountie saw the trail of blood across dry patches on the rocky floor, and he followed them from the sunny entrance zone of the cave into the dusky twilight zone of perpetual shade.

  What was that?

  A cry in the dark ahead?

  Was it a scream?

  Or was it maniacal laughter?

  The deeper reaches of the drippy cavern thickened into a labyrinth of vertical speleothems. Block the central holes of soda straws and they filled out into carrot or tapered stalactites like these, fattened by deposits of calcite dribbling down their sides. Each narrowed to a drip point at its bottom and, where drops of dissolved limestone splashed down to spread out on a flat surface, built up mounds with rounded tops and no internal canals. Where stalactites and stalagmites fused together, they formed columns like this petrified forest around Zinc. The drops that had dripped onto the slope slanting into the tunnel at the back of the cavern formed a slick tongue of flowstone across the uneven floor beneath the Mountie’s feet.

  A single stalactite hung like an uvula at the deep throat. It marked the point where the twilight zone of perpetual dusk gave way to the dark zone of pitch-black night.