Peter Benchley's Creature

  "C'mon," he said. "Let's forget it and take off."

  The pilot waited a long moment before he replied. When at last he did, he turned to Webber and said, "I hope you still got a pile of film left."

  "Why?"

  " 'Cause we just found ourselves one hell of a bonus."

  6

  THE pilot summoned the other submersible and positioned it fifty yards away, across the field of wreckage. With the four lamps throwing a twenty-thousand-watt pool of light, they could see nearly the entire site.

  The pilot grinned at Webber and said, "Well?"

  "Well what?"

  "Well, what is it?"

  "How the hell do I know?" Webber snapped. "Look, I'm freezing, I'm tired, I have to hit the head. Do me a favor and stop—"

  "It's a submarine."

  "It is?" Webber said, and pressed his face to the porthole. "How do you know?"

  "Look there." The pilot pointed. "That's a diving plane. And there. That's gotta be a snorkel tube."

  "You mean a nuke?"

  "No, I don't think so; I'm pretty sure not. It looks to be steel. See how it's oxidizing—real slow, because there's almost no oxygen down here. But it is oxidizing—and it's small and the wiring's shitty, old-fashioned. I'd say we're talking World War Two."

  "World War Two?"

  "Yeah, but let's try to get closer." The pilot spoke into his microphone, and, on cue, the two submersibles began to crawl toward each other at a speed barely above idle, skimming the bottom just high enough to avoid roiling the silt.

  Webber's film counters told him he had eighty-six frames left, so he shot sparingly. He tried to imagine the wreck whole, but the destruction was so complete that he couldn't see how anyone could identify individual sections of the ship.

  "Where are we on the thing?" he asked.

  "Looks to me like the stern," the pilot said. "She's lying on her starboard side. Those pipes there should be the after torpedo tubes."

  They passed one of the submarine's deck guns, and because it actually looked like something, Webber shot a couple of frames of it.

  They came to a gaping wound in the side of the ship and saw on the silt a few feet away a pair of shoes looking as if they were waiting for feet to step into them.

  "Where's the guy that wore them?" Webber asked as he shot the shoes from different angles. "Where's the body?"

  "Worms would've eaten him," the pilot said. "Crabs, too."

  "Bones and all? Worms eat bones?"

  "No, but the sea does. Deep, cold salt water dissolves bones . . . it's a chemical thing. The sea seeks out calcium. I used to want to be buried at sea, but not now, not anymore. I don't like the thought of being lunch for creepy-crawlies."

  They saw a few more recognizable items as they crept toward the bow: pots from the galley, the frame of a bunk, a radio. Webber shot them all. He was readjusting one of his cameras when, at the edge of his field of vision, he saw what looked like a letter of the alphabet painted on a steel plate. "What's that?" he said, pointing.

  The pilot turned the submersible around and moved it slowly forward. Looking through his porthole, he said suddenly, "Bingo! We just identified the boat."

  "We did?"

  "The kind, anyway. That's a U painted on one of the conning-tower plates. It's a U-boat."

  "A U-boat? You mean she's German?"

  "She was. But what she was doing this far south in the middle of nowhere, the Lord only knows."

  Webber shot pictures of the U from several angles as the pilot nudged the submersible on toward the bow of the submarine.

  When they reached the forward deck area, the pilot disengaged the motor and let the submersible hover. "There's what sank her," he said, focusing the lights on an enormous hole in the deck. "She imploded."

  The deck plates were bent inward, their edges curled as if struck by a giant hammer.

  As Webber shot a picture, he felt sweat running down his sides; he imagined the moment, half a century before, when the men on this boat suddenly knew they were going to die. He could imagine the roar of rushing water, the screams, the confusion, the panic, the pressure, the suffocation, the agony. "Christ . . ." he said.

  The pilot put the motor in gear, and the submersible inched forward. Its lights reached into the hole, illuminating a skein of wires, a tangle of pipes, a . . .

  "Hey!" Webber shouted.

  "What?"

  "There's something in there. Something big. It looks . . . I don't know . . ."

  The pilot maneuvered the submersible above the hole, tilted the bow down and, using the claws on the ends of the articulate arms, tore away the wires and pushed aside the pipes. He angled the lights into a single five-thousand-watt beam and shone it straight down into the hole. "I'll be damned. . . ."

  "It looks like a box," Webber said as he watched the lights dance over the greenish-yellow surface of a perfect rectangle. "A chest."

  "Yeah, or a coffin." The pilot paused, reconsidering. "No. Too big for a coffin."

  For a long moment, neither of them spoke. They just stared at the box—wondering, imagining.

  At last, Webber said, "We ought to bring it up."

  "Yeah." The pilot nodded. "The only question is how. The bastard's gotta be eight feet long. I bet it weighs a ton. I can't lift it with this boat."

  "How about both boats together?'"

  "No, we can't lift a thousand pounds apiece, and I'm just guessing. It could be a lot more than that. We couldn't. . ." He stopped. "Just a sec. I think they've got five miles of cable in the hold of that ship up there. If they can weight an end of it and send it down, and if we can get a sling around the box, maybe . . . there's a chance. . . ." He pushed a button and spoke into his microphone.

  It took the two submersibles nearly an hour to retrieve the weighted cable sent down from the mother ship and to secure the box in a wire sling. By the time they gave the ship the order to begin lifting, they were pushing the limits of their air supply. And so, as soon as they made sure that the box was free of the submarine's hull and was rising steadily, they shed ballast and began their own ascent.

  Webber felt exhausted and elated and challenged, impatient to get to the surface, open the box and see what was inside.

  "You know something weird?" he said as he watched the depth gauge record their meter-by-meter progress up toward daylight.

  "This whole thing's weird," the pilot said. "You thinking of something in particular?"

  "That wreckage. All of it was covered by silt. Everything had a gray film on it... except the box. It was clean. That's probably why I saw it. It stood out."

  The pilot shrugged. "Does silt stick to bronze? Beats me."

  7

  "I DON'T believe this!" Webber said. "Metallurgists, archaeologists, chemists . . . who gives a shit? All that counts is what's inside! What are they thinking of?"

  "Yeah, well, you know bureaucrats," the pilot said, trying to be sympathetic. "They sit around with their thumb up their ass all day, and now, suddenly, they got something to do, they gotta justify their existence."

  They were standing on the stern of the ship as it steamed westward toward Massachusetts. The box was secured on a cradle on the fantail, and Webber had spent hours mounting lights on the ship's superstructure to create a suitable atmosphere of mystery, for when the box was opened. He had chosen sunset, photographers' "magic hour," when shadows were long and the light soft, rich and dramatic.

  And then, not half an hour before he was to begin shooting, the ship's captain had handed him a fax marked "Urgent" from the Geographic: he was to leave the box untouched and unopened until the ship reached port, so that a cadre of scientists and historians could meet the ship and examine the box and open it in the presence of a writer, an editor and a camera team from the National Geographic Explorer television series.

  Webber was devastated. He knew what would happen: his lighting setup would be destroyed; he'd be shunted aside, given a backseat to the TV team, ordered around by the experts.
He'd have no chance to shoot enough film to have ample "outs"—pictures the Geographic wouldn't want and which he could sell to other magazines. The quality of his work would suffer, and so would his pocketbook.

  Yet there was nothing he could do about it, and worse, it was his own fault. He should have stifled his excitement and waited to inform the magazine about the discovery of the box.

  Now he shouted, "Shit!" into the evening air.

  "C'mon," the pilot said, "forget it. Let's go down to the wardroom; I got a friend there named Jack Daniel's who's dyin' to meet you."

  Webber and the pilot sat in the wardroom and finished the Jack Daniel's. The more the pilot groused about bureaucrats, the more convinced Webber became that he was being shafted. He had discovered the box, he had photographed it inside the submarine, he should be the one to take the first, the best—the only—pictures of what was inside.

  At eight-forty-five, the pilot pronounced himself stewed to the gills, and he staggered off to his bunk.

  At eight-fifty, Webber decided on a plan. He went to bed and set his alarm clock for midnight.

  * * *

  "That's Montauk Point," the captain said, indicating the outer circle on the radar screen, "and there's Block Island. If we had a calm, I'd anchor off Woods Hole and wait for daylight." He looked at the clock mounted on the bulkhead. "It's one-fifteen now; we'll be able to see pretty good in four hours. But with this easterly blowing like a banshee, I'm gonna take her into the shelter of Block and then go up the coast at first light. No sense getting everybody sick and maybe smashing up some gear."

  "Right," Webber said, nauseated by the pool of acid coffee that sloshed in his stomach as the ship nosed into a trough and then rose askew onto the crest of a combing wave. Pushed by a following sea, the ship was corkscrewing through the night. "Guess I'll go back and try to get some sleep."

  "Put a wastebasket by your bunk," the captain suggested. "Nothing worse than trying to sleep in a bed. of puke."

  Webber had gone to the bridge to see how many lookouts were on duty and had found only two, the captain and a mate, both in the wheelhouse, both facing forward. The stern was empty and unobserved.

  Back in his cabin, he put a finger down his throat and forced himself to vomit into the toilet. He waited five minutes, tried to vomit again, but brought up nothing but bile. He brushed his teeth, and, feeling clearheaded and more stable, he slung a Nikon with an attached flash over his shoulder, picked up and tested a flashlight and walked aft, out onto the stern.

  The wind was blowing twenty-five or thirty knots, but there was no rain, and the ship was moving with the wind at fifteen knots, which cut its bluster: walking across the flat, wide stern was no worse than trudging into a fresh breeze.

  Two five-hundred-watt lamps flooded the afterdeck with light. The submersibles squatted on their cradles like mutant beetles assigned to guard the gleaming greenish-yellow box that lay between them.

  Webber stayed in the shadows as he crossed the hundred feet of afterdeck. He crouched behind the portside submersible, checked to be sure no one was watching from the wings of the bridge, then shone his flashlight on the side of the box. .

  He had no idea how heavy the lid of the box was— hundreds of pounds, certainly more than he could hope to lift alone. If he had to, he could use the lifting rig from one of the submersibles, a big steel hook shackled to a block-and-tackle arrangement and powered by an electric winch. But perhaps the lid was spring-loaded; perhaps there was a release latch or button.

  He emerged from the shelter of the submersible cradle, crossed the deck and knelt beside the box. Facing aft to shade the flashlight beam with his back, he followed the lip of the lid from one end to the other. On the far side, only a few feet from the edge of the fantail, with the ship's wake boiling as it rose and fell beneath him, he saw a design etched in the bronze: a . tiny swastika. Beneath it was a button.

  He pressed the button, heard a click, then a hiss, and the lid of the box began to rise.

  He knelt, stunned, for a moment as he watched the lid move up tantalizingly slowly, rising at no more than an inch a second.

  When it was about half open, he got to his feet, turned on his camera, raised it to his eye, focused it and waited for the beep signaling that the flash was ready to fire.

  The light was dim; the lid shadowed the interior of the box, the view through the lens was shimmery and amorphous. The box was full of liquid.

  He thought. . . was that a face? No, not. . . but it was something, and facelike.

  There was a sudden thrashing in the liquid, and flashes of what looked like steel.

  For a fraction of a second, Webber felt pain, then a rush of warmth, then a feeling of being dragged underwater. And then, as he died, the bizarre sensation that he was being eaten.

  8

  IT needed to feed, and it fed until it could feed no more. It drank, sucking ravenously, inefficiently, until its viscera refused to accept any more of the warm, salty fluid.

  Once nourished, it was still disoriented and confused. There was motion and instability and, when it rose from its box,, an alarming lack. Its gills fluttered, gasping for sustenance, but found none until it submerged again.

  Nerve impulses fired randomly in its brain, crossing barren synapses, unable to sort responses. It was programmed with answers, but, in its frenzy, it was unable to find them.

  It sensed that sustenance was nearby, and so, in desperation, it emerged again from the safety of its box and sensed its surroundings.

  There, just there. The dark and welcoming world to which it must return.

  It was bereft of knowledge but keen in instinct. It recognized few imperatives but was compelled to obey the ones it knew. Its survival depended on fuel and protection.

  It had no powers of innovation, but it did have enormous strength, and that strength was what it called upon now.

  Trailing streaks of mucous slime, it moved to the far end of the box and began to push. Though increasingly starved for oxygen, its brain was able to generate electrical impulses that charged its muscle fibers.

  The bow of the ship buried itself in a trough, then the stern rose. The box slid forward, pushing the creature with it. But then the bow recovered and climbed toward the sky, and as the stern fell rapidly, there was a tiny interstice when the box was weightless.

  The box moved aft, teetered on the edge of the fantail and tumbled into the sea.

  As soon as it felt the cold, comforting confinement of salt water, its systems responded with instantaneous regeneration. The creature soared downward through the night sea, infused with the primitive perception that it was once again where it should be.

  The ship pitched and slewed its way toward the lee of an island as a blood-spattered Nikon camera rolled back and forth across the afterdeck.

  PART THREE

  1996 WATERBORO

  9

  SIMON Chase leaned close to the television monitor in the boat's cabin and shaded it with his hand. The summer sun was still low in the sky, and its brilliance flooded through the windows and washed out definition on the green screen. The slowly moving white dot was barely visible.

  With his finger Chase traced a line on the screen, checked it against a compass and said, "Here she comes. Swing around to one-eighty."

  "What's she doing?" asked the mate, Tall Man Palmer, as he spun the wheel to the right and headed south. "Been out to Block for breakfast, coming back to Waterboro for lunch?"

  "I doubt she's hungry," Chase said. "Probably so full of whale meat she won't eat for a week."

  "Or longer," said Chase's son. Max sat on the bench seat facing the monitor and meticulously copied its data onto graph paper. "Some of the carcharhinids can go more than a month without eating." He made the remark with studied casualness, as if such esoterica about marine biology was on the tip of every twelve-year-old's tongue.

  "Well, excuse me, Jacques Cousteau," Tall Man said, chuckling.

  "Don't mind Tall Man, he's just jea
lous," said Chase, touching Max's shoulder. "You're right." He was proud, and moved, for he knew that Max was reaching out, trying to do his part in building a bridge that, under other circumstances, would have been built years ago.

  Tall Man nodded toward shore and said, "Let's go tell the folks on the beach that the lady ain't hungry. They'd be tickled to hear it."

  Chase looked through the window at the rocky beach of Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Though it was not yet nine in the morning, a few families had begun to arrive with their picnic hampers and Frisbees and inner tubes; a few young surfers in wet suits were bobbing on the minuscule waves, waiting for a ride that might never come—not today, at least, for there was no wind and no forecast of any.

  He smiled at the thought of the scramble, the panic, that would ensue if the people had any idea why this innocent-looking white boat was cruising back and forth out here, less than five hundred yards from the beach. People loved to read about sharks, loved to see movies about sharks, loved to believe they understood sharks and wanted to protect them. But tell them there was a shark in the water anywhere within ten miles— especially a great white shark—and their love changed instantly to fear and loathing.

  If they knew that he and Max and Tall Man were tracking a sixteen-foot white shark that likely weighed a ton or more, their affection would turn to blood lust. They'd holler for it to be killed. Then, of course, as soon as someone did kill it, they'd go right back to mouthing off about how they loved sharks and how all God's creatures ought to be protected.

  "The shark's coming up," Max said, reading digital numbers on the screen.