What Lurks Beneath (3 page)

A dead end.

Fifteen feet ahead, the tunnel tapered to a hole no larger than his fist. He moved to examine it, but was only able to confirm what he already knew. There was nowhere to go. He felt an overwhelming despair.

He turned around and came to rest in a sitting position, looking back into the shifting clouds of silt. Preparing himself. But after a few moments, nothing appeared. He glanced at his air. Maybe ten minutes left. Maybe less.

So this is it.
He began to tremble.

He sat at the end of the tunnel, his light pointed into blackness, as he waited for the thing to reappear and claim him.

H
e was dead.

Confined to the small space, the specimen simply had given up. The arrow-like male squid had settled to the bottom of the tank, where his arms had relaxed into a beautiful fanlike pattern below his mantle, but any appealing coloration he had once been capable of had faded from his body.

Dr. Valerie Martell sat on a stool beside the two-hundred-gallon tank, staring at the dead cephalopod. The latest batch of
Dosidicus gigas
—ten juvenile specimens in all, each about the size of a large lamp—had been relatively healthy. All were now gone. This little guy had been the last holdout.

She wasn't surprised. All along, she had disagreed with the aquarium director's insistence to continue trying to raise this species in captivity. They were animals that belonged in the open ocean. Still, she had hoped that maybe, just
maybe
, this one would survive. He had seemed tougher than the rest. But now he was gone too.

She sighed. This squid was just her latest failure.

Outside the lab, it was gray and raining in Moss Landing. January along the Central California coastline often brought slow-moving systems that yielded most of the year's precipitation, turning the hillsides a brilliant green. Despite the weather, Val knew that she should be doing something outside today. Getting some exercise. Going for a drive. Or even trying to catch a matinee. It was a Saturday, and she hadn't really taken a day off in a month. She glanced at her running shoes beside the door, where she kept them for when she needed to blow off steam, but didn't get up.

Looking back at the juvenile squid, she thought about Will. Her research on these squid had brought them together. So much had changed in the last year, though.

He probably had left home by now. When she'd departed early in the morning, he'd still been snoring on the couch, the blinds closed to the daylight. She had gotten him a job doing maintenance at the nearby shipyard, as he planned the next career move. It was only supposed to be a temporary job. But he wasn't moving forward. Just as she had done lately, he'd been immersing himself in his work. Avoiding her.

And then there was his drinking.

Val picked up a set of metal forceps and poked at the squid in the tank. Three days ago, Specimen Number Forty-four had been captured right here in Monterey Bay, where a resident population had established itself over the past decade. Hooked by an old fisherman who knew of the squid's value and thus brought the live specimens in.

Like this squid, her partner didn't seem to thrive in a sedentary life. After he'd almost died two years ago, he'd needed to undergo months of physical therapy. And his life had been in disarray. They'd been in love, though, and things had been wonderful. There had even been talk of marriage, which neither of them had expected. For the first time since junior high, Val had stopped focusing on her work. They had filled voids in each other's lives, and she had released a remarkable passion in him.

But that was more than a year ago.

She'd waited patiently for him to get back on his feet. He'd done quite well for the first year, although she knew inside he'd never fully recover from some of the losses he'd suffered.

And then, such a scary but wonderful thing had happened. Right before the bad thing happened.

Since that day, she had watched helplessly as he slowly self-destructed over the past six months. As he started drinking again, slowly at first.
Just a few beers
. Then, not long after, more frequently. And then he bought the first bottle of rum. He said it was to quell the nightmares, as it had in the past, and to deal with the constant pain in his shoulder. Although she voiced her concern, she put up with it, perhaps out of guilt. She knew that his shoulder, and many of his scars, still represented sacrifices made out of his love for her.

And then he had started to become dark.
Angry.
He was never abusive, but frightening, his temper simmering beneath his cowboy hat like a pot about to boil over.

Val shook the thought away as she watched the raindrops spatter against the window. She wondered if she too was dying from being in captivity. She had lost any trace of the tan she had worn for years when doing fieldwork in Mexico. Her thick, dark hair had grown much longer, since she no longer needed to keep it out of her dive mask. But it had made sense to stop the field research. She had made significant progress in understanding how these squid communicated, and the directors of the Point Lobos Aquarium Research Group had decided it would be too much of a liability for her to continue her fieldwork.

Two of her papers on
Dosidicus gigas
had recently been published, which made PLARG's leadership very happy. But her last big project in Mexico had ended long ago. She'd considered applying for more funding to study the shoals of invasive squid emerging off the California coast, but as soon as the huge numbers had arrived, they'd suddenly disappeared. Since then, only a few smaller resident squid had appeared offshore here in the Bay. The creatures were very dependent on ocean patterns, and as climate shifts occurred and food sources rose and fell, so did their populations and migration patterns. They would be back, but for now they were gone.

The next obvious challenge had been to study live specimens here at PLARG. Val's employer was happy to fund her in the safety of a lab, studying the animals
ex situ
, but was no longer comfortable with the risks of funding her research of the animals in their deepwater environment. Besides the obvious dangers in working with
Dosidicus
in its natural environment, there was the opportunity of money to be made if her employers could display the alien creatures to the public, so Humboldt squid husbandry had become the focus at deep-sea-oriented PLARG.

The latest live squid had all been immediately separated, placed in their own tanks so they wouldn't attack and kill one another. Yet every one they had brought into captivity had become anxious, ramming at the walls of the large tanks. One had even managed to hurl itself out and splatter onto the floor one night, where it later died. None of the squid had eaten. And the bioluminescent communication the animals used in the wild, which had been the previous focus of her research, did not occur in the lab. Few natural behaviors did.

All had now died.

But Val admired their persistence. Unlike her, they hadn't been brought under the yoke. They had fought their captivity until they faded away.

She thought about the evening to come. Her presentation. The aquarium heads required all their researchers to prepare a quarterly PowerPoint presentation to the public on their latest research. To put on a smile and talk about how wonderful things were going. To make a passionate plea for their research, for the aquarium, to inspire its donors. But she wasn't feeling it today.

Eric Watson would also be presenting tonight. She would be opening, but he was getting the coveted final presentation. The precocious kid was getting all the funding now. He and his fancy unmanned underwater vehicles. But he'd been helpful with her own research. And she had to hand it to him: He knew how to follow the money.

Her lack of motivation wasn't just about playing second fiddle. Or even about her failures to keep captive squid alive, or make breakthroughs in her research. Setbacks were all part of science. But she had also felt self-conscious presenting lately. Although still quite lithe, she'd gained ten pounds over the last several months. And in the mirror she had started to really notice the tiny, sun-furrowed wrinkles near her eyes. She knew that she was just being hard on herself, and that she was still young and skinny, but it still bothered her.

She sighed again. She knew it was time for a change.

She felt like she might cry. Instead, she took a deep breath and turned away from the tank, searching for her black backpack. In it she had packed her workout clothes. She changed and laced up her still-damp running shoes, and then she pulled the hood of a waterproof jacket over her head, and stepped out into the rain.

L
ike impatient children, its own limbs aroused it from its slumber as daylight faded far above. They were already stirring when it woke, busy snaking into dark cracks running off the low chamber around their master. But signals sent from the mindless appendages to the creature's brain reported no success in finding sustenance—only inedible bits of bone and other waste deposited from previous meals.

It needed to hunt.

The organism extended its limbs away from its body and, affixing them to the smooth walls of the underwater cavern, silently squeezed its bulk through the narrow cavity in a series of undulations. It soon arrived at the bottom of a funnel-shaped submarine pit, where it paused to peer outward from its concealed position. Then gradually, patiently, the beast slid its great form from within the deep recess in the carbonate platform and into the fading light at the mouth of the pit. There it stopped moving again.

Hidden by the darkness, it remained motionless for a short time, observing the darkening deep-ocean reef—a shallow, unfamiliar environment—for signs of prey. Over time, it had learned to ignore the smaller prey animals on which it had once fed—the benthic crabs and blind fish of the depths—and likewise it now ignored the smaller fishes that schooled past.

For years it had only focused on larger deepwater animals. Six-gill sharks, squids, giant isopods, oversized marine worms. And on the warm-bodied animals that in small pods plied the night waters of the open ocean above it. It saw none of these now.

Sensing nothing of interest, and comfortable that it was safe, it fully extended its appendages and jetted water downward from its soft body. It rose from the blackness of the hole to reveal its massive form to the open ocean. As its eyes cleared the rim of the pit, it spied a large, spotted ray above it in the gloom, just out of the range of its arms, but the ray saw its hulking mass as well and quickly spun away in a sweep of wings. The potential prey disappeared over the lip of the deep reef.

The organism moved out over the dark reef and relaxed its body, slowly settling toward the rough surface. Dozens of fish scattered as its flesh draped over a broad area.

Although the creature was unique in its size, like all of its much smaller relatives in the ocean, it was forced to leave the safety of its lairs to hunt for food. But usually these lairs, and its hunting grounds, were in much deeper waters than this. Now, it felt the powerful urge to descend. Larger prey might still be foraging the deep at this hour, but soon would cease for the night. And once its preferred quarry was back near the surface of the open ocean, the much slower beast would be unable to effectively pursue it.

Deep on the ocean floor, it had always sought most of its sustenance. Camouflaged on the abyssal plain near a rotting animal's remains, or some other attractant, it would ensnare larger animals that approached to investigate. Or it would hunt in the open waters above, only at night, its flesh replicating the patterns of schools of mid-size fish or squid to ambush even larger animals coming to feed on them. But the only predator of any real concern to it in its mature state sometimes plied the same depths of the open ocean. Thus, after consuming a meal, it always retreated to the safety found within caverns deep down the walls below the reef.

After watching the spotted ray depart, it turned its body sideways and gently pushed off the rock escarpment. It jetted sideways by expelling a few pulses of seawater, quickly moving away from the shallower water of the island shelf toward the blackness of much deeper water.

Toward the abyss.

It glided out past the edge of the shelf, where the sea floor dropped thousands of feet down a vertical rock face. Below it was a void of absolute darkness. It gathered in its limbs, forming itself into an enormous disc, and sank.

Occasionally, it extended a limb to rebalance and maintain an upright position, but otherwise it yielded to gravity. Its flesh was slightly denser than the seawater around it, so its foray into the abyss required little energy beyond an occasional pulse of horizontal propulsion. The water temperature plummeted, cooling the creature's bulbous body and blood.

It was not an efficient swimmer. Its biology was best suited to hunting along the ocean floor, within its recesses. Life was scarce in the depths of the ocean, but there it might have the best odds of locating a larger meal. A familiar meal. A meal of substance.

The light quickly faded as it made its long descent. Soon it was black. The creature could not see here, even with its large eyes. But it was not blind. It could still
feel
. It could sense vibrations.

And it could
taste.

After descending for some time, the sea floor eventually transformed from the sheer rock face to a more gently sloping bottom that curved toward the abyssal plain. It reached a broad channel in the depths, cut by a northward-flowing current of seawater. Here the quality of the water changed almost imperceptibly, yet the organism sensed that this fluid was somehow denser, laden with a fine silt of particles. The turbidity current sank below and past the cleaner ocean water around it. Dropping into the current, the organism ceased propulsion and reconfigured its body, such that its appendages were splayed broadly beneath it, and after a moment its great form impacted the ocean floor, releasing a cloud of fine silt into the blackness.

It turned into the current. This required more effort than moving with the flow of water, but it offered advantages to the hunter. The organism retained the advantage of receiving tastes and other stimuli that would alert it to the presence of living things upstream. And by moving toward the oncoming flow of water, the organism's prey would have difficulty detecting its own presence.

Rolling its great body upstream on its many writhing limbs, it began to hunt. Despite its massive bulk, it moved with silent grace. Only slightly heavier than seawater, it was not forced to exert significant effort to remain above the ocean floor. Millions of receptors in each arm continually tasted the currents, assessing chemicals and feeling textures, seeking any sign of prey.

As each limb contacted the seafloor, it gathered information, sending signals back to the organism's brain. The limbs worked in chaotic concert, managing to avoid one other while tumbling gently into the bottom and pushing off and forward, moving the creature into the oncoming stream of particle-laden water. In this fashion it could continue locomotion while constantly tasting for food.

It continued into the cold current, a long cloud of sediment billowing hundreds of feet into the black water behind it.