What Lurks Beneath (28 page)

V
al found what she'd been looking for. She lifted the amulet out of the bathroom drawer and looked at it. A leather pouch, shaped like a block-headed sperm whale, hung from the thong. She smelled it and winced, jerking it away. It too was making her feel ill. The smell was sweet, almost fruity.

Then she knew.

Ambergris. It smelled like the waxy secretion produced in the digestive systems of whales and used to make perfume. The Obeah woman had probably gotten a chunk from a dead whale, or a globule washed up on the beach. That explained why the pouch was shaped as it was.

She stared at it a moment. She wasn't sure why, but something had compelled her to find it. She carried it back outside, to where she was working on her laptop and trying to catch up on e-mail. She dropped the amulet onto the table and sat down.

She thought about Sturman. Planning to go back home with Will made her anxious. What would happen when they got back to Monterey?

She heard a distant, high-pitched noise that might have been sirens. She strained to hear more, but there was nothing over the mounting breeze in the palms.

The bank of heavy approaching clouds hid the sun, but she'd seen the black dot of the arriving helicopter appear miles away as it crossed over the broad Tongue of the Ocean from New Providence, from Nassau, and finally reached Andros, descending and disappearing behind the distant towers at Oceanus. Several minutes later, the distant drone of the helicopter had grown louder, and she saw the black dot moving back out to sea. Presumably with the manta ray dangling below it. The operation must have been a success.

She stood and moved to the edge of the patio, looked down the coast of the island. She could see the towers of Oceanus in the distance. Then she heard it again: high-pitched wailing. Yes, they were sirens.

Oceanus looked peaceful from here. Maybe there had been a car accident—

She jumped as her cell phone rang. She turned and picked it up, looking at the display.
Mack.
She answered.

“Mack, hi. What's going on? Did they release the—”

“Valerie, get down here. Now.”

“What? Has something happened?”

“There's been some sort of accident. An aquarium tank collapsed. The big one. Flooded a tunnel, with people inside. I just left the casino a few minutes ago. I'm trying to get down there now.”

“Is Will all right? Eric?”

“I don't know. I don't see them anywhere. But people are hurt.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Get down here, Val.”

“How? I don't have a car?”

“Find a way.”

“Mack, are
you
okay? Mack?”

But he'd hung up. She ran through the house, found her sandals, and burst out the front door. She paused, and rushed back to the patio. She grabbed the strange necklace and stuffed it into a pocket of her shorts. She found one of the rusty bicycles behind the house and jumped onto the torn seat. She pedaled furiously toward the highway.

E
ric stood, dripping water, beside a small crowd at the top of the flooded stairwell, looking helplessly into the dark water. He could only see five or six steps down, with the water stirred up and the lights in the submerged tunnel now shorted out. A woman's body had just floated to the surface. She was a resort worker, in a turquoise shirt. Like the one Ashley was wearing.

“Oh, no.”

He moved toward her. But he quickly saw that it was not Ashley, and felt guilty at his relief. It was the heavier woman, and before he or anyone else could reach her body to fish it out he could tell by the massive head wounds that she was already gone.

When he'd first arrived at the stairwell, an old woman had miraculously popped up in the churning water, still alive but choking on water, wet strands of gray hair clinging to her ashen face. He had plunged down the steps with a few other tourists and helped pull her out. Once up the stairs, she began to cry, talking about a missing grandson. She had been whisked away to an ambulance, seemingly having heart trouble.

Moments later, another person had floated up into the opening between the stairwell and the angled ceiling. That one had been facedown. He appeared to be one of the young resort guards. Others had helped fish out the man.

Eric looked over to where he was now splayed on the wet concrete twenty feet away, one arm flopped grotesquely off to the side as a young woman still stubbornly administered CPR to revive him. Eric knew it was probably too late.

He helped two other men fish out the heavyset woman's body, and drag it irreverently up onto the cement by its arms, like some clubbed seal. Then he turned and looked at the pool. The underground tunnels appeared to be completely flooded. There was no way down there, where he was almost certain Ashley, Sturman, and many others had still been when the glass gave way. Even if there was a way down, something else was down there now.

The ruined tank had refilled, through the breach in the man-made wall that had previously separated the tank from a natural lagoon. These state-of-the-art aquariums had been built below sea level, utilizing the cay's natural submarine caverns to create the incredible display. Seawater must have always remained in this cavity throughout the construction process, unless they had pumped it out at some point to complete the project. Now, with the hydrostatic pressure in the tank suddenly gone, the lower cement wall on the opposite side from the tunnels also had collapsed. Where the broad fissure had opened up, the surrounding rock had also come free, and jagged boulders the size of small cars had crashed down into the water in the tank.

A security guard arrived and began relaying the information to the local emergency services over his radio. He made Eric and the others move back from the stairwell as some semblance of order was established.

It didn't matter. It had been too long now for anyone to make it out by holding their breath alone. He had to check the other exits to the tunnels, to see if anyone had come up alive there. He took a deep breath to calm himself, feeling hot despite his clothes being wet up to his chest. There was still hope.

He hurried back toward the opaque pool where the aquarium had been. A number of tourists stood in groups around it, staring down in awe as security guards tried to herd them away. Something moved in the water.

He looked down into the clouds of suspended sediment in the tank, where the clear waters of the aquarium had been not ten minutes ago, squinting to see past the rippled surface. After a moment, he saw something move again, out of the corner of his eye.

There was a wave, on the far side of the pool, created from the upward movement of something below. Something big. Just below the surface, the dark shape was rising. He looked at a couple still near the water. He had to warn them.

Shouting, he ran down the broad, cobbled path toward them. He cut off into some landscaped perennials, racing along the edge of the pool. A groundskeeper listening to music through ear buds as he hacked at some brush with a machete jumped back as Eric hurtled past. Eric brought his forearms in front of his face as he crashed through the screen of vegetation at eye level.

The woman screamed.

Near the center of the pool, the elongated tip of a huge tentacle rose vertically out of the calm surface, ten feet or more, snaking skyward with the last foot or two dangling back down. Long rows of pale suckers, visible even from here, ran up one side all the way to the end.

Several other appendages followed, dripping water as they fanned out like reddish serpents. They extended rapidly in all directions. The two tourists turned to run.

Two of the arms danced across the water in seconds. One seized the man, coiling around his torso. The octopus silenced his cries of terror with a squeeze, the meaty coils thickening as they applied pressure. There was the sound of bones breaking before the tentacle flung his lifeless body through the air.

Before the body even landed in the water with a loud splash, the other arm caught the woman and crushed her. It tossed her body sideways, headfirst into the rocks. More arms rose, and moved toward a family trying to gather young children to flee.

The groundskeeper behind Eric muttered something, and he turned to see the man drop the machete and run.

M
ack hobbled down the ornately cobbled walkway, toward the sound of Eric's voice. The nub where his leg had once been throbbed painfully from running across the grounds on his prosthesis, and he gnawed on the ruined toothpick in his mouth to get his mind off it. He'd just arrived from the casino to find a group of resort staff gathered where the aquarium had collapsed. Then he'd heard Eric's desperate shouting and hustled toward it.

Mack could see him a stone's throw away, standing above the ruined aquarium tank, yelling. He was alone, his back to Mack as he shouted out over the water. He kept leaning down and thrashing the water with his arms, then standing to yell again.

Mack stopped, breathing hard, and listened.

“Come on, you son of a bitch! Over here!” Eric was shouting at a family on the other side of the pool.

Mack spit the toothpick out of his mouth. “Eric!”

Eric ignored him, still hollering and slapping at the water with something he held in his right fist. Mack saw a shortcut and dashed through some brush. He emerged and stumbled to the water's edge, fifteen feet behind the kid. Eric's clothes were drenched, and he was holding a machete.

Then Mack saw them.

Huge shapes, darting up through the water, directly at the family.
Tentacles.
And he could see another one, moving more slowly, in the opposite direction. One that Eric couldn't see from down at the water's edge.

“Don't move, Eric.”

Eric turned when he heard Mack's voice. Twenty feet behind him, the tentacle rose quietly from the water, lengthening into a long, inverted hook of rigid flesh.

“What?” Eric said. He slowly turned his head back toward the water.

The tentacle continued to rise behind him. It was tapered, each visible foot of length thicker than the last, and reddish-brown in color, with two rows of round suckers.

It fell forward. Slapping the water, it rushed at Eric. He started toward Mack.

The arm tip swept sideways and just missed Eric's head as he flinched downward. He splashed through shin-deep water on a ledge in the pool and was almost on the shore when he stumbled and went down. Mack ran toward him, into the water, and saw why he had fallen. The slender tip of a second tentacle was corkscrewed around his ankle.

Eric reached for Mack. “Mack! Help me!”

Eric fell onto his belly, hard, as he was jerked backwards. He began to slide away in the knee-deep water, twisting as he was rolled onto his back. He tried to hack at the tentacle with the machete. As Mack scrambled after him, he continued to rotate clockwise, sputtering each time his face went under. He dropped the machete and reached both arms toward shore, clawing for a grip on the bottom.

As they twisted Eric's body, the coils around his legs had thickened, advancing up his frame in spirals as the thing easily turned him over again in the shallows. Like some deadly python, the arm was going to coil up his body and crush him to death.

Mack plunged his hand in the water and snatched the machete just as the other tentacle came back toward them, whistling past his head. He swung the machete after it, but he was late and missed. Eric was wrapped up to his hips now, grimacing in pain. He looked at Mack in agony.

Mack splashed toward him as the tentacle hauled him away, back to the deeper water. He was almost to the drop off. Mack raised the machete. The first tentacle came back at him again and he turned, swinging the curved blade as he ducked.

This time it struck home. The machete lodged into the tentacle a full twenty feet from the tip, where it was thicker than Mack's own body. He pulled on the handle, but the blade was imbedded six inches into the dense flesh.

The arm recoiled, twisting away and taking the machete with it. It wriggled in the air madly and the weapon finally came free as blue blood spurted into the air, spraying both men and the water around them. The wounded tentacle flopped down, splashing furiously, and then retreated into the pool.

Mack found the machete again and turned back to Eric. The coiling tentacle had lifted him up out of the water, and now slowly swung his body around, turning his head away from Mack. It seemed to be toying with him. Eric dug at the crushing flesh around his waist with both hands, his eyes shut in pain, and then his feet were thrust skyward and his head went under.

Mack lunged toward him, focused on the foot-thick arm. The suckers slid past as the tentacle twisted higher up Eric's body. It was almost around his chest. Mack raised the machete over his head and took aim at the thickest part of the arm, just below the surface and six inches from Eric's torso, and brought the blade down.

He felt the machete strike home, passing clean through. There was a tremendous splash as Eric and the severed arm fell back down into the water.

The water clouded with blue blood, and Eric's head popped above the surface. He was turning purple and still struggling to breathe. A meaty stump spouting blue fluid popped out of the water next to him momentarily before twisting back under, rolling on the ledge and taking Eric under with it.

Mack tossed the machete aside and grabbed at the severed tentacle with both hands, trying to uncoil it and lift Eric's head to where he could breathe, but it was impossible. The meaty arm, despite being amputated, was still squeezing, and with Eric's weight it was like lifting two or more men.

Mack instead dug his fingers under Eric's armpits and lifted slightly, getting his head above water, then heaved backwards. He grunted as he slid Eric's body and the tentacle ensnaring it toward shore. They were almost there when Mack tripped on his prosthetic leg and splashed onto his rear.

He kept Eric's head above water, but the kid was losing consciousness and unable to speak. The detached arm coiled up as far as his ribcage, slowly crushing the life out of him.