McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Finally, when Tedford apparently seemed insufficiently impressed, he’d gone into a locked cabinet with a great flourish and had produced a tooth—white—identical to the tooth Tedford had been shown. The Warrnambool fishermen had pulled it from the tatters of their net-line, he said.

  Moreover, the dentist said, working the dentifricial root around his back molars, he’d found the fishing grounds. And with them, the islands.

  Tedford had been unsuccessful at concealing his shock and excitement.

  The job had taken him a couple of weeks, Heuvelmans had gone on, but on the whole he was quite set up by his overall ingenuity and success. He was traveling there in a matter of days, to positively identify the thing, if not catch it. Could Tedford accompany him? Not by a long chalk.

  What they were talking about, Heuvelmans mused, after they’d both had sufficient time to ponder the brutality of his refusal, would be second only to the Sperm Whale as the largest predator the planet had ever produced. He then lapsed into silence with the look of a man peering into deep space.

  When Tedford finally asked what sort of weapons he intended to bring, the man quoted Job: “He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.” And when his guest responded, “Am I to understand that you’re proceeding unarmed?” Heuvelmans said only merrily, “He maketh the deep to boil like a pot.”

  Tedford had taken his leave intending to return the next day, and the next, and the next, but had come back the following morning to discover Heuvelmans already gone, on, as his housekeeper put it, “a sea-voyage.” He never returned.

  Tedford finally asked the housekeeper to notify him if there was any news, and two weeks after that the good woman wrote to say that part of the stern of the ship her master had contracted, the Tonny, had floated ashore on the Tasmanian coast.

  He’d prevailed upon the housekeeper to give him access to the sanctuary—in order that he might help solve the mystery of the poor man’s disappearance—and there discovered, in the course of tearing the entire place apart, the man’s notes, a copy of the precious map: everything. On one of the three islands there was said to be a secret opening, a hidden entry to a sort of lagoon otherwise completely encircled by rock and ice. He was to look for light blue ice along the water level, under a half-dome overhang, to paddle up to that place, and to push through what he found. That would be his private gate into the unknown.

  It had reached the point at which his friends had noticed that the great majority of his expressions reflected discontent, and he’d started speaking openly about being crowded round by an oppressive world. Everything had been herded into a few narrow margins; everything had been boxed up and organized. What was zoology—or paleontology —but an obsessive reordering of the boxes? Finding what science insisted wasn’t there—that was the real contribution.

  He liked to believe that he was the sort of man who viewed the world with an unprejudiced eye and judged it in a reasonable way. In letters to those few undemanding correspondents who’d remained in touch, he described himself as suppliant before the mysteries of Nature.

  He felt more frequently as though his only insight was his desire to be left alone. Passing mirrors, he noticed that his bearing was that of someone who’d seen his share of trouble and expected more on the way.

  He didn’t find himself to be particularly shy. When addressed he always responded. He had proposed to one woman, and she had visibly recoiled, and replied that their friendship had been so good and so pleasant that it would have been a pity to have spoiled it.

  His first memory was of beating on the fireplace hob with a spoon. Asked by his father what he thought he was doing, he replied, “I’m playing pretty music.”

  His mother, whose family had made a fortune in shipbuilding, was prone to remarks like, “I have upgraded my emeralds, down through the years.”

  As a boy he’d felt his head to be full of pictures no one else could see. It was as if the air had been heavy-laden with strange thoughts and ideas. He’d grown up on an estate far outside of their little town, with his brother Freddy as his closest and only friend. Freddy had been two years older. They’d trapped bandicoots and potoroos in the understory of eucalyptus stands, and Freddy had taught him how to avoid getting nipped by jew lizards and scaly-foots. They’d ridden each other everywhere on the handlebars of their shared bicycle, and worked together on chores. They couldn’t have been more different in their parents’ eyes: tall and fair Freddy, who’d announced at the age of fourteen that he’d been called upon to minister to lost souls in the interior, once he came of age; and the diminutive Roy, with a mat of brown hair he’d never fully wrestled into order and a tendency to break jars of preserves or homemade wine just from restlessness. Freddy had helped out at the local hospital, while Roy had collected filthy old bones and left them lying around the house. Freddy’s only failing, in fact, seemed to have been his inability to more fully transform his brother.

  Until it all went smash, the day before Roy’s fourteenth birthday, when Freddy, on an errand to the lumber mill, somehow had pitched into the circular saw and had been cut open from sternum to thigh. He’d lived for two days. His brother had visited him twice in the hospital, and each time Freddy had ignored him. Just before he had died, in Roy’s presence, he had asked their mother if she could hear the angels singing. She had fallen to weeping again, and had told him she couldn’t. “What a beautiful city,” he had responded. And then he had died.

  Tedford’s father had never mentioned the accident again. His mother had talked about it only with her sister and a close cousin. They’d had one other daughter, Mina, who had caught a chill and died at the age of seven.

  His father had become the kind of man who disappeared the moment attention was directed elsewhere. He seemed to leave just for the sensation of motion. He had developed a way of lingering on a word, kneading it for its sadness. His mother had evolved the belief that Providence put such people as Freddy on Earth to make everyone happy, and then to open everyone’s eyes to certain virtues once they were gone.

  Tedford had been found a month after the accident, asleep in the road with a mouthful of raw onion, and a paring knife in his hand.

  No one had ever talked to him about his brother’s refusal to see him. And until his brother had died, he would have said that his life story had been the story of a nuisance.

  Dawn came like a split along the horizon. The first night had gone well, he thought, peering out of his tent flap. He’d even slept. While he pulled on his over-clothes the walls of the tent bucked and filled in the wind. His arms and back ached from the previous day’s paddling. Cold damp air filled his sleeves and the back of his shirt.

  The night before it had occurred to him, the moment he’d extinguished his reading-lantern, that for the next two months he would be as far from human aid as he would be on the moon. If he ran into serious mishap, only his own qualities would save him.

  Old Tate had used to remark, often after having noted some particularly odd behavior on Tedford’s part, that there were as many different kinds of men in the world as there were mothers to bear them and experiences to shape them, and in the same wind, each gave out a different tune. Tedford had slowly discovered himself to be unfit for life in the land-surveyor’s office as he had gradually come to understand his inability to express to anyone else the awful resiliency the image of Carcharodon Megalodon had taken on in his psyche.

  The creature inhabited dreams that did not even feature marine settings. He’d once pronounced its name in church services. As far as Carcharodon Megalodon was concerned, he was still a caveman, squatting on his haunches and bewitched by the magic-conjuring representation he himself had drawn on the wall.

  But if he was acting like a schoolboy, at least he’d resolved to address the problem, and see Life as it was, for its own sake, prepared to take the consequences. Lacing up his boots, he reasoned to himself that he wanted to see the animal itself, and not his fear and delight in it.

  Fif
teen million years ago, such monsters had been the lords of creation, the lords of time; then they’d remained nearly unchanged throughout the ages, carrying on until there were only a few stragglers hanging on the very edge of annihilation. Life had gone on around them, leaving them behind. The monsters science knew about, and the ones it didn’t. The formation of the northern ice caps and the extension of the southern during the Pleistocene had resulted in the drastic lowering of the sea level, exposing the continental shelves around Australia and Antarctica and trapping all sorts of marine life in the deep pockets of isolated water. Tedford was convinced that in a few of those deep pockets—adjacent to the cold, nutrient-rich bottom current that seemed to originate along the edge of Antarctica, to flow north to all the other continents of the world—his quarry resided, surfacing every so often in the same remote feeding-zones.

  What percentage of the sea’s surface had been explored? (Never mind its abyssal depths.) And meanwhile, dunderheads who plowed back and forth across the same sea-lanes with their roaring engines announced with certainty that there was nothing unusual to see in the ocean. Outside of those narrow water-lanes, upon which everyone traveled, it was all darkness. He was in an unexplored area the size of Europe. He was in a region of astounding stories. And he had always lived for astounding stories.

  His first day of searching came up a bust when a cresting wave swamped his kayak a few feet from camp. He spent the bulk of the afternoon shivering and beating his arms and having to disassemble and examine the camera for water damage. His second day was scotched when he slipped on an icy slope outside his tent and badly sprained an ankle. The third dawned gray and ominous and turned to an ice storm in the time it took him to outfit his kayak. The fourth dawned bright and clear and he lay in his tent, cold and wet, his ankle throbbing, unwilling to even believe that things were beginning to turn around.

  He finally roused himself and hurried into his outer clothes and spent some time in the blinding sunlight chipping the glaze of ice off his kayak’s control surfaces. He breakfasted on some dried fruit and tea. The sea was calm. He loaded the camera and rifle in their oilskin pouches into the storage basket on the kayak’s prow, hung his compass around his neck, put his map-packet in his jacket pocket, settled into his seat, and shoved off from the ice with his paddle. His little tent seemed to be awaiting his return.

  He traveled east along the lee side of the island. It was larger than he’d realized. He saw streaks of guano on some of the rocks but otherwise no sign of life. The paddling seemed to help the pain in his ankle, and the ice slipped by at a walking speed. Every so often he had to skirt what looked like submerged ice-reefs.

  The easternmost island unveiled itself through a torus-shaped mist. From what he could see from his bobbing little boat, it looked to be the largest of the three. The seas around it displayed more chop, perhaps from the open ocean beyond. He spent the remainder of the day circling it twice, each time more slowly. He saw no light blue ice, no half-dome overhang, no hidden entry. Upon completion of the second full circuit, he despaired, and immediately upbraided himself for his lack of pluck.

  The sun was getting low. To the south, in the far distance, icefields stretched from horizon to horizon, with peaks towering higher than mastheads.

  He bobbed back and forth for a bit in the gathering swell, stymied, and then paddled a hundred yards or so offshore and began his circuit again, from a different perspective.

  Halfway around on the northern side he spied a bit of yellow fifty feet up on an ice-shelf. He considered various approaches to it for some minutes, trying to calm his excitement, paddling this way and that, and finally puzzled out what looked like a workable route. He lost another half hour trying to find a secure tie-up. When he finally began climbing, he had only an hour or so of sunlight left.

  Even with his ankle, it was an easier climb than he’d hoped. At the top he came upon a recent encampment sheltered in the lee of a convex wall of ice-covered rock. There were meat tins and an old bottle. It looked as if the contents of a small leather bag had been burned. Only two notebooks and a stylographic pencil were left. The notebooks were empty.

  He assumed all of this was Heuvelmans’s work. Perhaps he’d had the ship he’d contracted wait some distance away while he’d made the rest of the journey alone.

  But what to make of it? He crouched among the tins, feeling himself maddeningly unable to concentrate. It was only when he stood, aware that the light was failing at such a rate that he had to leave without delay, that he saw the rock cairn, arranged in an arrow-shape, pointing to the west, and the island from which he’d come.

  He spent the evening in his bedroll listening to his tent walls buffet madly in the wind, and trying to devise a method of measuring the salinity of his little bay. The morning revealed the interior canvas to be tapestried with thin sheets of ice crystals in fantastic designs.

  Sunrise was a prismatic band in the east, violet near the water and shading to golden above. He found it difficult to conceive that along that violet line, steamers ran, and men talked about the small affairs of life.

  He’d secured a packet from Hobart on the southeastern coast of Tasmania for the trip across the south Indian Ocean. In spite of the steamships and railways and motorcars, the whole place had felt close to the end of the earth, especially at night. Tedford had prowled around in his sleeplessness, and in the last hours before dawn, the hills around the docks had emanated with layers of unearthly noises. He’d spent a little time in some pubs but had found a general state of disinterest in science to be the case among the fishermen and dock-hands. His ship had left in the predawn darkness of his third day in the town, and he remembered thinking as it pulled away from its moorings that he was now up to his neck in the tureen.

  Three mackintoshed figures had been walking the quay alongside his ship in a thin, cold rain. He’d thought of calling out to them a last word, and had dismissed the notion. He’d seen big ships and little ships on his way out of the harbor, some with their deck-lights burning and some in darkness except for the riding lights upon their mainstays. He’d been able to make out the names of a few of them as his ship’s light had passed over their overhanging sterns or bows. Lighters and small craft had been crowded into their darker shadows. Near a steamship’s funnel, a great lamp had illuminated some coaling basins and the sides of a wharf.

  Once the sun was up, he had passed the time imagining that every wave had its twin, and singling one out and searching for its mate. The islands had revealed themselves only a few miles west of Heuvelmans’s coordinates, and he’d arranged his pickup date, descended the ship’s ladder into his heaving kayaks, at that point lashed together, had given the ship’s mate a cheery wave, and had set off from the hull. He’d looked back only once, and the ship had disappeared by that point.

  He opened a tin and made sure of his breakfast. While he ate he observed how the snow around his campsite organized itself into little crescents, as though its lee sides had been scooped out with tablespoons.

  How he’d liked life, he wanted to think—every bit of it, the colored and the plain, the highlights and the low! He wondered whether the mere feel of things—common things, all sorts of things—gave anyone else the intensities of contentment that they provided him.

  He thought he would start with the windward side before the breeze picked up. When he set off, a petrel winged past overhead, in a leisurely manner: the first sign of life. A half an hour later he noted, out to sea, the steam-puff fountains blown into the air by the exhalations of whales.

  Again he circled the entire island without finding anything. This time he repeated the circle even closer to the shore, however, his kayak often bumping and scraping on rocks. In a protected hollow, he found another arrow, this one hastily carved into the rock. It pointed the way into an unpromisingly narrow backwater, which, when he maneuvered it, opened a bit into an odd kind of anteroom. The water below him seemed to drop off into infinity. The wavelet sounds were excessively ma
gnified in the enclosed space. Way below, he could make out thick schools of dull green fish, two to four feet long, which he assumed to be rock cod.

  Before him was a wall of ice thirty feet high. He bumped and nudged his kayak back and forth. The wind played tricks down the natural chimney. He could see no opening, and he sat.

  But in the late morning, when the sun cleared the opposite wall above him, it illuminated, through the ice, a ridge about ten feet high, in the middle of which a six-foot-wide fissure had opened. The ice in frozen cascade over the fissure turned a pearl blue.

  He hacked at it and it came away in slabs which dunked themselves and swirled off in eddies. He kept low, poled his way in with his oar, and the mouth of a great blue cavern opened on his right hand.

  When he passed clear of the cavern it was as though his vision was drowned in light. The sun rebounded everywhere off snow and ice. It took him minutes, shading his eyes, to get his bearings.

  He was in an ice-walled bay, square in shape, perhaps four hundred yards across. The water seemed even deeper than it had before, and suffused with a strange cerulean light. There was no beach, no ledge. At their apex, the walls looked to be seventy feet high.

  The atmosphere above them seemed to have achieved a state of perfect visibility. Away from the sun, in a deep purple sky, a single star was shining. The taste of the air was exhilarating.

  He waited. He circled the bay. He felt a silent and growing desire for lunch. Schools of big fish roiled and turned, everywhere he looked in the depths.