White Shark (30 page)

They took the housing into the cabin,
dried it and set it on the table.
 
The
housing was undamaged, but the harness straps had been shredded.
 
Sadly, silently, Amanda removed the tape from
the camera and put it into the VCR.
 
She
rewound it,
then
pushed the ‘play’ button.

The first few minutes of the tape were
indistinguishable from the others:
 
long
shots of whales, close-ups of whales, whales cruising, whales rolling, whales
diving.
 
Then
came
an interminable shot of the surface, from just above, then from just below.

"She's basking," Amanda said,
and there was a thickness to her voice.
 
"I told you she was the lazy one."

The camera went underwater again and
showed two whales in the distance, moving away.
 
For perhaps fifteen seconds it pursued them, before turning away and
showing nothing but blue.

Amanda said, "She gave up."

"But look," Max said, pointing
at a miniscule black figure in the center of the screen.
 
"That's one of the other sea lions.
 
Zeppo was following her, coming home."

The image
roller-coastered up and down, as the sea lion had accelerated through the water,
trying to catch up to its fellows.
 
Then it slowed and broke through the surface
— for a breath, presumably — and when it submerged it cruised slowly for a
moment.
 
Then, abruptly, it veered off.

Chase said, "Something's caught her
attention."

Though there were no other animals visible
in the blue vastness, speed and direction were discernible from rays of
sunlight refracted by the surface into arrows that shot down into the darkness,
and by the countless motes of plankton that glittered as they passed the lens.

"She's circling something,"
Amanda said.

"But why can't we see it?" asked
Chase.

"Because she's above it, looking
down, and the
camera's
on her back."

The sea lion had gone into a long upward
loop —
they saw the light from the surface flash by far away — and then
had dived, turned and hung upright in the water, vertical and motionless.
 
The surface shimmered in the distance above.

Amanda said, "She's looking at it; she's not afraid of it."

"Isn't she going to take pictures of it?" asked Max.

"She doesn't think she's supposed to; the only things she's supposed
to tape are—"

Suddenly the camera jolted backward, and the blue water was clouded by a
black billow.

Amanda screamed.

For ten or fifteen seconds, the image swung crazily, lurching left and
right, dimmed by what looked like ink and then clear and then dimmed again.

Something shiny gleamed in front of the lens.

"Stop the tape!
"
Chase said, but
Amanda was frozen, her eyes wide, one hand over her mouth.
 
And so he reached forward and pressed the
backward-scan button.

The image was fuzzy, for the shiny thing was too close for the lens to
focus.
 
But as he advanced the tape
again, frame by frame, Chase had no doubt about what he was seeing:
 
five claws, curved, pointed, razor-sharp and
made of stainless steel.

27

"Hit me again, Ray," Rusty
Puckett said to the bartender at the Crow's Nest.
 
He slid his empty glass across the bar and
shoved a five-dollar bill after it.

"Enough's enough, Rusty," said
Ray.
 
"Go on home."

"Hey!
 
I put a fuckin’ fifty down there, and said lemme know when I worked my
way through it."
 
Puckett pointed to
the jumble of bills beside the ashtray.
 
"I ain't halfway there yet."

"Watch your mouth!
"
Ray said.
 
He put his hands on
he
bar, and leaned close to Puckett.
 
"Happy hour's come and gone, Rusty;
there's people
here for dinner, they're not interested in
hearing your cock-and-bull stories.
 
Do
us both a favor:
 
pick up your change and
head on home."

Puckett turned around on his stool and
gazed glassily at the room.
 
Ray was
right:
 
the bar had filled up, and there
was a line of people waiting for tables in the dining room.
 
When had all this happened?
 
He looked at his watch, closing one eye to
sharpen the numbers on the dial.
 
Christ!
 
He'd been here three
hours.

He noticed a few people staring at him,
and guessed they'd been listening to him while he was telling Ray about what
he'd seen.
 
To hell with them, he didn't
care, it was true, every bit of it.
 
He
winked at one of them, a not-bad-looking woman, and he saw her blush and turn
away.
 
She was probably interested; maybe
he'd go have a talk with her.

Something funny popped into his head.
 
He turned back to Ray and said, loud enough
for everyone to hear, "you don't dare shut
me
off, Raymond; the fuckin’ place’d go broke.

Ray didn't laugh, in fact he looked kind
of pissed off, and all of a sudden he raised the fold-back panel in the bar,
came through and grabbed Puckett by the scruff of his shirt.

Puckett felt himself lifted off the stool,
felt Ray's hand jam a wad of money into his pants pocket and found
himself
being frog-marched out the door.

"You can come back when you sober up
and stop hallucinating," Ray said.
 
"I'd worry if I was you, Rusty.
 
You're in the grip of the goddamn DTs."

Puckett heard the door close behind him,
and Ray's voice saying, "Sorry, folks."

He stood on the street, bewildered,
swaying slightly.
 
A couple got out of a
car and gave him a wide berth as they made their way toward the restaurant.

He put a hand on the side of the building
to stop the swaying.
 
Then he started
down the street, keeping his eyes on each foot as it landed in front of the
other.

What the hell did Ray mean, ‘cock-and-bull
stories’?
 
Ray knew him well enough to
know he didn't make up fairy tales.
 
And
he wasn't in the grip of any DTs, either.
 
He knew damn well what he'd seen, what had almost killed him, and he
hadn't exaggerated anything.

It sounded stupid, impossible.
 
But it was the truth.
 
He'd seen a fuckin’ monster.

Part Five

The Blessing

28

"Are you sure you don't want to wait
for Amanda and me?
"
Chase said.
 
He held the new bow line of the Whaler while
Max started the motor and stowed his camera under the steering console.
 
"She'll be ready in half an hour,
eleven-thirty at the latest."

"I can't," Max said.
 
"The Blessing of the Fleet starts at
noon; if I don't go now, I'll never get a decent spot."

"You sound to me like a young man who
has a date."
 
Chase smiled.

Max grimaced.
 
"Dad..."

"Okay, sorry...
 
Now: you know where the
anchor's
stowed, you've got two life jackets aboard, you—"

"We've been through all that."

"Right."
 
Chase sighed
and tossed the bow line into the boat.
 
"Park the boat at the club; beach it there if there're no
slips."

"Okay."
 
Max put the boat in gear, turned the wheel
and moved slowly away from the dock.

"Remember," Chase called after
him, "no stopping on the way... for
any
thing...
no matter what you see."

Max waved and shouted, "See
you!"

Chase stood watching as Max accelerated,
bringing the boat up onto a plane.

At first, Chase had resisted letting Max
take the Whaler; the boy had never been out in the boat alone
.
  
Though the channel into Waterboro was
well marked, there were rocks to hit if you were careless.
 
Though the outboard motors were meticulously
maintained by Tall Man, all outboards harbored gremlins and could seize up and
stop at any
moment
 
for
no apparent reason.
 
Though Max had shown
that he was a careful boatman and a fine swimmer, what would happen if he had
to go overboard and swim for shore?

But for the past three days, the weather
had been lousy:
  
the wind had blown from
the northeast, a relentless fifteen to twenty knots, sometimes gusting to
forty, and a chill rain had soaked the coast from
New
Jersey
to
Maine
.
 
There had been nothing for Max to do, except
for an occasional trip to town with Chase or Tall Man, during which the boy had
disappeared into the warren of back streets and tiny houses and, Chase hoped and
assumed, made friends with some of the local children.
 
Max had looked forward to the Blessing of the
Fleet, had been caught up in the town's enthusiasm for the celebration.

Now that the day had arrived and the
weather had at last turned fine, Chase wanted Max to enjoy it, and so he had
relented.

He almost wished the weather had gotten
worse.
 
The good thing about bad weather
was that it kept people out of the water, boats had stayed ashore and nobody
else had been hurt.
 
Whatever was out
there, wherever it
was,
it had had nothing to prey
upon.
 
Chase hoped that fair weather
wouldn't bring on a feeding frenzy.

The morning after the sea lion had been
killed,
he had taken the videotape to the police station and
shown it to Gibson.
 
He had suggested
postponing or even canceling the Blessing until they could determine what the
animal on the tape might be.

Gibson's reply had been brusque.
 
"Forget it, Simon," he had
said.
 
I'm not gonna cancel the biggest
event of the summer because of two seconds of crappy videotape that doesn't
look like diddly... or on the testimony of some drunk."

"What drunk?"

"Rusty Puckett.
 
He got himself sauced to the gills last
night, started telling everybody that he'd seen some mutant zombie from
hell.
 
He made such a nuisance of
himself,
he got thrown out of the Crow's Nest and two gin
mills, that I locked him up."

"He's here?
 
Can I talk to him?"

"Nope, not until
after the Blessing.
 
Then you can talk to him all you want, till
you both come down with bullshit poisoning."
 
Gibson had paused.
 
"Have you shown this tape to anybody
else?"

"No."

"Good.
 
I think I'll just keep it here for the next
few days.
 
We have all the rest of the
summer to get hysterical."

"I wish I thought you were right,
Rollie," Chase had said.
 
"But
something's out there."

"Then let it stay out there, Simon,
or let it go to hell away.
 
Either way, I
don't imagine it's gonna come ashore and start hassling tourists."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

When the Whaler was so far away that it
was invisible against the contours of the mainland, Chase walked up the hill
and down the slope to the sea lion tank.
 
He could see Amanda standing on the concrete apron, using fish to try to
lure the sea lions out of the tank.
 
They
were shaking their heads, refusing.

"They won't do it," Amanda said
when Chase arrived.
 
"It's like
every day since we got back from the whales:
 
no matter what I do, they will not leave that tank.
 
It's as if they're receiving warning signals
from the water."

"What signals...
electromagnetic?"

"I guess so.
 
All I know is
,
something
is telling them to stay out of the sea.
 
And they're behaving like they're scared to death."