What Lurks Beneath

by Ryan Lockwood

  Bleeding, she had coiled the wounded arm close to her body and slid silently back into the deepest part of the tank. Then the currents in it had shifted, and she could taste familiar odors. Taste her den. From somewhere in the tank, water from near her brood was somehow flowing back into the tank.

  She sought the small opening from which she had come, the narrow pipe that might lead to some way out, perhaps to the ocean. But it was obscured in rubble now. The thundering wall of water had broken apart rocks and glass, and the structures along the bottom of the space had changed. The opening was no longer there. Still, she could taste the deeper ocean water seeping in from somewhere below. She had searched the confined area for any way out, but found nothing.

  So she rested, concealed at the bottom as her brain processed her options. She forced her inquisitive arms to remain still, so as not to reveal her position. She could not risk further injury. She would not fight again unless threatened. But the steady noise from the wind whipping across the surface above, and the relatively shallow water churning so close to her sensory organs, disturbed her. She needed deeper, quieter water. Safer water. And she needed to protect her young.

  She rose off the bottom again, and moved into the tunnels.

  CHAPTER 66

  The sounds against the door had stopped. It was quiet again, except for everyone’s breathing.

  “Maybe it left,” Ashley finally whispered.

  Sturman said, “Maybe. But we need to move. Follow me.”

  He turned and started swimming toward the construction tunnel, the light held above his head. Barbas tried to follow, towing Roxanne with him, but she was resisting in her panicked state. He stopped as he fought to calm her. Ashley lunged into the water directly behind Sturman, trying to keep her face above the water, the boy clinging to her shoulders.

  Something slammed against the door. Something very heavy. The boy cried out.

  “Oh, my God!” Roxanne shouted. “It’s here again!”

  Ashley heard a splash behind her and looked back. Barbas had released Roxanne and dived in after the others. The metal door groaned and then made a popping sound as it bulged inward. The long board Sturman had braced against it snapped, and it burst inward, sending up a wave.

  A huge tentacle burst from the wave and slammed into the low ceiling, then crashed back into the water. It found Roxanne. Winding around her, it thickened as it contracted, the coils swelling under the strain. Roxanne’s screams turned to a gurgling sound as blood erupted from her mouth and nose, spraying the ceiling.

  The terrified boy tried to climb onto Ashley’s head and she went under. Water went up her nose. She opened her eyes underwater as she fought to loosen his grip on her hair. She saw Roxanne’s body moving sideways in the dim light, moving away from her. The thing was trying to pull her back through the doorway, but it was only opened partway, and her body wouldn’t fit. The arm jerked at Roxanne’s body several times, slamming her into the doorjamb until her crushed body finally disappeared into the rectangular hole.

  Ashley felt her bladder go. She turned and kicked madly for the surface, her lungs burning. Then the boy’s grip in her hair was gone, and his weight left her.

  She popped back up to the surface, gasping. She turned around to see what had happened to him. But the boy was still there. Sturman had swum back to them, and now held the sobbing child against one shoulder.

  “Here.” He thrust the light into her hand. “You lead. I got the kid.”

  She grabbed the light, and without looking back she kicked into the dark tunnel.

  “What is that?” Ashley whispered.

  Until now, the question had remained unspoken. Nobody seemed to want to accept what they’d seen inside the tank, the living thing pressing its enormous body against the tall glass, covering it. The thing that had shattered the tank, and killed Roxanne.

  “An octopus,” Sturman said. His cowboy hat was gone, floating somewhere in the darkness.

  “What do you mean? It’s too big. Nothing is that big.”

  They stood in waist-deep water now, at the back end of the tunnel. Ashley was up against some tools submerged near them, where they leaned against the rough stone wall: a jackhammer, a few pickaxes. The light cast an eerie glow on the walls and ceiling, but barely penetrated the surface.

  “How do you know what it was? Are you a scientist?” Barbas said.

  “I know.”

  Barbas said, “How did it get into my aquarium?”

  “Good question.”

  “Do you think it’s coming back?” Ashley said. “Can it get in here?”

  “I don’t know,” Sturman said. “Probably.”

  “Where’s my nana?” the boy said.

  Sturman held him to his chest. He looked at Ashley, shook his head. She bit her lip and took a deep breath before answering.

  “I don’t know, child. We’ll look for her later, okay?”

  “I wanna go home.”

  “I know you do. I know. Soon.”

  She wondered if he knew she was lying.

  CHAPTER 67

  “So it is an octopus?” Mack said.

  “Maybe. A cephalopod, for sure, but it’s definitely an undescribed species.”

  He sat beside Val in the backseat of Mars’s taxi. They were barreling down the highway, passing oncoming cars dangerously as they headed back toward the resort. Piled behind them, in the back of the van, was DORA and their scuba gear.

  “So how big is this thing?” Mars said, glancing at Val in the rearview mirror.

  “Depends on how much of the arm we were looking at. I’d have to see more to be sure, but this animal has gotta be at least fifty or sixty feet across, arm tip to arm tip. Maybe much larger than that, based on what you described. That makes it far bigger than any known species of cephalopod.”

  “Even a giant squid?”

  She swallowed. “A lot bigger than that. But we need to focus on how it got into that tank.”

  Mack said, “So you can figure out where it can leave?”

  “Exactly.”

  He looked out the window, then back at her. There was a fire in his eyes. “Maybe we shouldn’t let it leave,” he said.

  She looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s trapped. Right now. Now’s our chance to kill it.”

  She shook her head. “No, Mack. This isn’t about revenge.”

  “You’re right. It’s about stopping that fuck from killing anyone else. Stop being a biologist for a minute, will you?”

  “I’m not having this conversation.” She looked away from him. Mars glanced at them in the mirror.

  Finally, Mack said, “So how do you think it got in there?”

  “I don’t know. But octopuses can fit through very small openings. And they’re the smartest invertebrates on the planet.”

  As they wheeled their equipment through the resort on a luggage cart, a gurney rolled past, pushed by two EMTs, the motionless figure strapped to it hidden under a sheet. The police and other EMS were all on scene now, and together with resort staff and good Samaritans had retrieved another three bodies that had floated up from the flooded tunnels. Apparently, the US Navy had also been alerted.

  The authorities were still trying to make sense of the stories they’d heard from the witnesses at the lagoon. Firefighters were working to get dive gear together to search for the missing. They were smart enough to know they couldn’t go in now. Nobody else had seen anything in the tank, but it was probably still in there. Val convinced them to hold off longer, to wait for Eric to explore the space with his ROV.

  After the gurney was gone, they continued rolling toward the tank. Mack turned to her.

  “How did that thing get so big? And how could it remain hidden until now?”

  “Obviously, it’s a new species.” She thought for a moment. “Ever heard of Humboldt squid?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they don’t live around here. Anyway, they’re animals I’ve studied for year
s. They spend a lot of time in colder, low-oxygen waters to slow their rapid metabolisms and devote more energy to growth. Giant squid get big for similar reasons. Maybe the deepwater offshore environment, the anoxic blue holes running under these islands, have the same effect—they keep these octopuses alive longer and allow more calories to go into size, like any cold-blooded animal.”

  “What do you mean, ‘these octopuses’?” Mack said. “You think there’s more than one?”

  “Hopefully not here, now, but there have to be others. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to breed.”

  He frowned and spat on the ground.

  When they arrived she left the cart by the flooded stairwell and walked over to where she could look down into the water of the ruined aquarium. A yellow line of police tape now ringed the water, and all entrances to the flooded tunnels. Security and police were keeping bystanders fifty or more feet away. But tourists were everywhere, and many others also lined the balconies of the hotel’s towers, trying to film everything from a distance.

  Looking down into the clearing water of what had been Pirate’s Cove, she wondered where the massive octopus was now. Nobody had seen it since it went after Eric. She wondered if there was any hope, if there could be any survivors in the submerged tunnels, where Sturman and the others had been. They’d already been missing for almost an hour, and if they weren’t somewhere safe, where they could breathe . . . She realized she had again touched her belly.

  No. She pushed the thought from her mind.

  “You hear about the Navy yet?” Mack said, limping over to her.

  “What now?”

  “Looks like a warship is headed this way.”

  “What for? They going to blow up the resort?”

  “If they want to help, I say let ’em. They got more resources than anyone else on Andros. And their weapons could really come in handy right now.”

  “Is Will’s friend coming?”

  “I don’t know. But they’ll be here soon.”

  Val thought of the gift from the Obeah woman. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the whale-shaped talisman. The one that smelled like ambergris. She stared at it for a moment.

  Valerie Martell was not a superstitious woman. But as the first heavy drops of rain hit her face and began to spatter the concrete, she fastened the leather thong around her neck.

  CHAPTER 68

  Sturman wondered if anyone else knew the water level was rising.

  They were at a dead end. The surface was still far above them, and because the tunnel construction was occurring from below—Barbas said it was because he didn’t want to disrupt the resort grounds until the tunnel was almost finished—there was no way out except past the octopus.

  They were trapped, and nobody was coming for them. Not coming in time, anyway.

  The water had risen from Sturman’s hips to his abdomen, and he knew it was because the construction workers had previously drilled a few narrow, vertical holes down from above to permit fresh air to enter the shaft. A wise move, but one that might cost them now. If the holes hadn’t been there, the water wouldn’t be able to fill the tunnel completely, because there wouldn’t be anywhere for the subterranean air to escape.

  He’d first become aware of the holes when he heard rainwater dripping down through them, between the muted rumbles of thunder. Now, with the cordless light turned off to save the little remaining battery power, his eyes had adjusted and he could see the ventilation holes as tiny, brighter spots in the ceiling—one ten feet from him, the other one maybe thirty feet farther away. They cast weak cones of light into the darkness.

  But the holes were only a few inches wide. They might provide air, even communication to the surface, but nothing more. Sturman and the others had shouted into them for ten minutes, but nobody had called back. Barbas was furious at his staff.

  And there was another problem. Sturman was also starting to hear things, and struggling to concentrate. Oxygen deprivation, or else there was some noxious gas trapped down here. Because even though the holes in the ceiling were designed to allow air to flow in, it was only flowing out now, with the water rising up from below and pushing it out. The air they were breathing smelled a little like gasoline, or paint thinner.

  “The Beast out of the Sea,” he whispered.

  “What?” Ashley said.

  “From the Book of Revelation. I know you’re a Christian. Saw the cross you wear around your neck earlier.”

  “Yes. My faith’s important to me. Are you a believer?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Don’t go to church anymore. When I was a kid, before my mom died, she made my brother and me read the Bible. I got into Noah’s Ark, the leviathan . . . and the Beast out of the Sea. That one painted quite a mental picture.”

  After a pause, Ashley whispered: “ ‘And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.’”

  “How can you remember all that?”

  “As a child, I spent a lot of time in church.”

  “That’s all nonsense,” Barbas said from the far corner. “There is no God.”

  “Ignore him,” Sturman said. “He may be rich, but he doesn’t know shit.”

  In the near darkness, the boy was now either asleep or unconscious. Sturman grunted, the muscles in his arms burning. Holding the kid’s deadweight was like supporting a sixty-pound bag of sand. At least the rising water had started to help support some of his weight.

  He was becoming increasingly lightheaded. And he was getting a headache. They all were. The toxic air was affecting his ability to form focused thoughts. But he couldn’t figure out why nobody had thought to try to contact possible survivors through the air holes.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” Ashley said quietly, sounding tired. “We need to do something.”

  “What do you mean?” It was Barbas’s deep voice.

  “You know what I mean. There’s something wrong with the air. And the water’s rising.”

  “What can we possibly do?” Barbas said, panting. “We need to wait. Maybe they are making progress.”

  Sturman said, “No. She’s right. We may be dead before they can get here. They need to know we’re alive.”

  “And how do we tell them?” Barbas said.

  “Someone needs to swim out.”

  “What?” Barbas laughed nervously. “Where? Where will we swim? That thing is still out there. Or else . . . or else help would be here now. And the tunnel entrance is hundreds of feet away.”

  “Maybe,” Sturman said. But he knew that there was only one possible option. Only one way out.

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere,” Barbas said.

  “I can’t go,” Ashley said. “I’m sorry. I’m a good swimmer, but not that good. It’s much too far.”

  Sturman felt an overwhelming urge for a drink. He pushed the thought from his mind, hating himself, wishing he had thought only of Val, of his survival, as motivation for getting out—and not of alcohol.

  “I’ll go,” Sturman said.

  He waited for more protest, but the others were silent.

  “Finally, Barbas, you don’t argue with me,” Sturman said, smiling.

  Barbas said, “Why? It’s a fool’s errand. You’ll barely make it back to the main tunnel.”

  “Maybe. But we’re almost out of time. Someone take the boy.”

  “Give him to me,” Ashley said.

  In the near darkness, she waded toward Barbas first, though, and Sturman figured she was probably handing him the light. She then came toward Sturman. He moved to meet her and gently lifted the boy toward her. He felt her arms wrap around his inert form. He didn’t struggle.

  Maybe the boy was worse off than they were, taking in more of the toxic air, with a faster heartbeat and higher metabolism. Maybe by leaving now, regardless of what happened to him, Sturman would buy the others just enough time. He had to. He didn’t really know these peopl
e, what they had done in their lives, but the boy, at least, deserved to live.

  “If I don’t come back, and nobody else does, keep shouting every few minutes,” Sturman said.

  Ashley said, “Good luck, Will.”

  Sturman moved away from the others, back toward the main tunnel. He realized his heavy Western boots were still on, making it harder to swim. Holding on to the wall, he removed them and let them sink to the bottom.

  Soon the rising water’s surface met the angled ceiling. He held his breath and dipped his head under, to gauge what he was in for, to see how dark it was under water. He could make out almost nothing in the darkness. But he heard a sound. A faint whirring.

  He came up for air and shook his head to clear it. Only your imagination. He would probably pass out before he made it even back to the door.

  Treading water, he said a silent prayer. What a fool he’d been. He’d actually had thoughts of suicide in his life, even recently. He’d made so many mistakes. Wasted so much of his time here. He took a few deep breaths, but his head felt the same.

  So be it. He took three more deep breaths, exhaling loudly each time to clear the carbon dioxide from his body. To have any chance, he would need to stay down for a long time. He slid under again.

  There was another sound underwater, a loud clang. He was not imagining it. It was very close, sounding like it came from the door. He felt movement in the water, a stirring. Something was coming toward him.

  He spun and kicked away from it, back toward the others. Reaching the air pocket, he popped out of the water, gasping for breath. He swore.

  “What is it?” Barbas said.

  “It’s coming back,” he said. “Now.”

  He swam to where his feet met the sloping bottom and splashed back toward Ashley, toward the corner, and found the handle of one of the pickaxes. He hefted it. The tool felt so small, so useless as he pictured the beast, pressed against the aquarium glass, its immense form blocking out everything else. He braced his feet on the bottom.