Something’s Down There

Chapter Nineteen

Miles away in the west was the mild orange glow of a lightning strike. It was the front line of a weather system, but it wouldn’t be reaching Hooker’s area until a good twenty-four hours later. The darkness was so complete that only the cold light of the stars indicated which way was up. There was no discernible horizon and no indication of the islands that were just beyond the curvature of the earth.

Automatically Hooker glanced down at his instruments. His compass told him he was right on course and his loran confirmed his position. But something was still not right. There was a knot in his stomach and he could feel a prickly sensation in his skin, and he knew the little hairs on his forearms were sticking straight up.

Crazy, he thought. Mad. He was beginning to know what Billy Bright felt when he was out here at night, and Billy Bright was one smart cookie. He could sense things that couldn’t be seen and draw conclusions from events that had no meaning at all to anybody else. Like when there were no flying fish around when there should have been.

The surface of the ocean was unnaturally flat and Hooker eased the throttle back to dead slow, then cut the engines off completely. For a minute the only sound was that of the bow edging through the water until the momentum ceased, then there was the total stillness of the night. No slapping of the waves against the hull. No splash of the fish making runs on the surface. There was nothing at all, just a horrible stillness.

Hooker just stood there, fingers tight around the wheel, trying to hear, and he finally realized that there was nothing to listen to. He wanted to yell, not because he feared something, but just to break the unnatural silence. His eyes reached out into the blackness and he wondered just what he was doing, standing unmoving in the middle of a noiseless ocean.

Then he suddenly realized what he was doing. It was what the rest of the sea and its creatures were doing. He was waiting. And he knew that something had been waiting for him too.

Billy had been right. He should have taken his advice. Whatever it was, who could face it down? Hell, it ate ships. It owned the damn ocean and wasn’t accountable to anybody. No human hand ran it and no living thing chose its destination. Nor its dinner, he thought sarcastically.

Hooker let his hands slide off the wheel and he walked to the stern of the Clamdip. The soft gleam of the binnacle light made the polished transom glisten, and when he turned and scanned the blackness around him there was not a single other light to be seen. The field of death had been chosen. The combatants were here. They had been waiting for each other and there was going to be a mighty struggle, and only one would leave this place.

For a long moment Hooker thought about the foreign unreality of it all. It was almost mystic, as if he were in an alien world in which he had no control at all, and for a brief interval of time he almost let his mind go defenseless. Then his training took over and he responded to a noiseless alert signal because he sensed something had changed, and that there was a presence he could challenge, engage and possibly beat. Possibly.

He heard the breathing first, a steady, rumbling, bubbling breathing that couldn’t be located, seeming to come from all around him. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t distant. It was someplace near and it was watching him. Whatever it was, it moved and the hull of the Clamdip rolled very gently. Momentarily the breathing stopped, then started again, louder this time.

The eater was coming in closer.

Then Hooker got the smell of it. It had the odor of deep death: vile, disgusting, so nauseating you knew it could be only one thing, the gut wrenching smell of human decay.

It was closer now and he could hear it. The boat was moving closer to it, so IT was coming to get him, slowly, silently and invisibly. And for some reason he looked up at the sky and saw that the lower stars had been blanked out by some great shadow that kept rising until it would be crouching over him for the final bite that would wipe any trace of him and the Clamdip from existence, and there was nothing that he could do, nothing at all. And then, in that same glow of the binnacle light, he saw its eye, a pale, whitish semiround thing looking down on him, and he backed up, startled, his hand hitting the camera he had left on the seat. And with a blinding beam the flash went off for a fraction of a second and Hooker saw the eater. He saw the teeth. He had looked death right in the eye and laughed!

The weaponry was right beside him. He grabbed the rocket launcher, slammed it into firing mode, turned toward the stern and pulled the trigger. The projectile didn’t travel far at all before it slammed into the gigantic bulk of the enemy, tearing through its skin to erupt into an inferno in its guts.

Even before the screaming, wrenching sounds started, Hooker had the mini camera in his hand, its powerful light brightening up the area so the whole world would be able to see the eater dying, hear its wild, bubbling noise, an enormous death rattle, and see its slow roll as the ocean filled its cavernous insides. The eye agonized and twisted out of sight as the death rattle turned into a frightening bellow, and as it appeared, the eater slowly slid back into the depth of the ocean and the stars came back into view again. The Clamdip rolled in the water’s disturbance, then settled into a proud stance as Hooker looked at his loran, jotted down his position and switched on the engines.

The sea stayed flat until he was two miles from Peolle, then a soft chop began slapping at the sides of the Clamdip. Billy Bright was waiting at the dock when he berthed. He was happy and laughing, but there was still something on his face that said he had done a lot of worrying about his friend out there, alone with the eater. All his instincts, all his native intuition had told him that this night the eater would be hunting for prey, and all the signs said it would be in the area Hooker would be sailing across.

Billy had to ask. It wasn’t like him, but he had to. Quietly he said, “Sar... you see she at all?”

“Judy didn’t come with me,” he told him solemnly.

Annoyance at the flip remark made Billy shake his head. “I mean... the other she.”

Hooker let a slow grin crease his face. It was the kind of grin that was the last thing a lot of enemies had ever seen. Behind it was the memory of the battle and the outcome, and it only lasted a second. Hooker said, “I killed it, Billy.”

“Sar...!”

“It’s dead. I know where it is. We can recover the remains and show it to the world. It did its share of damage but now we’ll use it to keep these islands, where nobody can mess them up at all.”

“But sar... why we get... the remains? If you killed it...”

“Tonight you’ll know why, Billy.” Hooker let out a little laugh. “You ought to be waking your buddies up with the good news. They can go night fishing again.”

They processed the tape on the Lotusland with only the technician in the lab with Hooker. Two copies were made from the original and Mako kept all three. Despite the unprofessional circumstances, the photography was perfect, clear and sharply in focus, with nothing to distract the viewer from the vividly shocking scene he was watching. The utter blackness made an ideal background for the subject, which looked even blacker, yet the form and shape of that monstrous thing left no uncertainty as to what it was.

Very distinctly Hooker remembered the look on the technician’s face while he viewed the tape, the absolute look of horror, the throbbing of the vein in his neck as he saw what was happening and recognized the monstrosity for what it was; then his held-in breath escaped from his chest like a burst balloon and his shock-widened eyes had looked over at Hooker, filled with unbelieving amazement.

The natives believed. Billy Bright had told them, so they believed. Judy believed because Mako had told her and Mako was to be believed. She could see it in his face and knew it was true, even if she didn’t know all the facts yet. Alley believed because old firemen and old agents don’t lie to each other. Berger believed because Hooker scared the hell out of him somehow and he knew he could do it.

Chana wouldn’t let herself believe it at all. Lee Colbert would wait for all the facts before he would decide, but he knew he was going to believe it.

No notice went out where the showing would be, no time announced, but just before the night came the islanders had all arrived and gathered in front of the big building Charlie Berger shared with Alley. A large portable screen from the Lotusland had been set up and silent eyes watched it uncertainly. The crew from the Tellig sat on the floor with the rest, and when the doors finally closed Mako Hooker took Judy’s hand and they both walked up to the screen.

The silence was complete.

Nobody blinked.

Hooker held the thumb activator that would turn on the projector and the audience waited.

He said, “There has been a terror out there in the ocean. It has taken ships and lives and disrupted these islands like nothing ever has before. It was silent, it was unpredictable, and it was deadly. There was nothing specific in its moves... it just came and went whenever it wanted to. It seemed haphazard, an enemy whose movements couldn’t be determined. Even our technology couldn’t locate it.” He paused for a long moment, then added, “But everybody knew it was there.”

His words generated a gentle rustling from the natives, hoping his next ones would be more comforting. They knew what Hooker had said and what Billy Bright had said, but only when they had seen the death of the eater would they truly believe it.

“Most of you here weren’t alive in the year 1914. There was a war on and Germany was running submarines in this area.” There was a subtle nodding of heads as a few remembered. “Some were destroyed off Reboka Island, as you know, either sunk by Allied gunfire or scuttled by their crews.” Again there was the nodding of heads. Those events were all part of their history.

“One wasn’t shelled by our side and it wasn’t scuttled,” Hooker said. “It went down and sat on the bottom to hide from our destroyers on the surface. Our detecting devices were crude then and nobody was able to locate it. When the enemy ships left and the way was clear, the captain gave orders to surface.”

The audience waited. They knew something critical was coming.

“At that time the flotation of submarines was activated by a Kingston valve that allowed water to flood the tanks when the air was compressed back in small cylinders in order to submerge, then blow out the water ballast to fill the tanks with air again to surface.”

Hooker let a picture of the operation set in their minds, and when he knew they all had it, he told them, “The valve had jammed. Nothing happened. They sat on that seabed, rationing the air until they were gasping for breath, until they died and that old submarine simply nestled down further in its own grave, the bottom filling in around it, creating a suction effect that was nearly permanent. The U-903 was, for all purposes, almost a dead thing.

Heads bobbed in silent acknowledgment this time.

“Almost,” Hooker said.

The heads stopped bobbing and waited.

“Like all dead things, the submarine started to decay. It wasn’t flesh as we are; so many years had to pass before a tiny hole showed in its steel skin. Now oil, its lifeblood, could leak out in tiny little blobs, but with all the oil discharges in the ocean now, nobody noticed those tiny spots with the sheen of oil.

“Oh, that ship was dying, yet it was coming alive too. Time had worked its power on that Kingston valve, and over the years a hardly noticeable leak had taken place there too and the compressed air had seeped out, and bit by bit the pressure had forced the seawater out of the flotation tanks, let the air in so the hull regained its buoyancy. A small, gentle buoyancy that would barely lift a matchstick, but it was a buoyancy, a positive effect, and every day it grew a little bit stronger, knowing that when the right time came, the buoyancy would take effect.

“Many years could have passed, or that tiny pinhole of decay could have let in more seawater than the lifting effect could handle, but it was mankind itself that caused the balance to change. Out on station was the naval ship Sentilla, engaged in a scientific investigation. When her electronic equipment had a breakdown the personnel resorted to using blasting charges to record echo soundings in the strata below the bottom.”

The audience seemed to sense what was coming next. There was no movement, no sound from the crowd, just an intense excitement, one that made them taut with anticipation.

“One by one, the shock effect of those blasts made the bottom tremor. Little by little the suction that held the U-903 in place began to erode away... until one day the positive buoyancy inside that steel hull was enough to let her rise slowly, maybe an inch at a time, from that sandy, mucky grave site until it hovered an inch or so above the seafloor like a wounded, baffled fish who has fought himself off a barbed hook, free finally, but in a strange, unknown place.

“We don’t know what the water temperature was, nor the air pressure above the surface, but we do know that the balance of the ship was so delicate that it would respond to every change in condition. It had no propulsion, so it would flow where the current took it. Pressure changes could force it to the bottom... or allow it to rise slowly, very slowly, causing no disturbance at all until it... and some other object met. How many times must it have appeared on the surface and stayed for hours without ever having been seen at all?”

Hooker saw the questioning in their eyes and answered it before they could ask it. “It didn’t look for boats to hit. Of all the hundreds of times you were out there, how many times was there a contact? That ocean is big and deep. The old hulk was subject to many variables... pressure changes in front of storms, temperature drops, current movements all determined where she could be, and when a ship and that hardened body collided, there was destruction.”

Someone from the native audience said, “The teeth. We know it had teeth! Even you saw the teeth.”

Hooker held up his hand and shook his head. “I saw what you said teeth could do.” He let his eyes drift over their heads and in the rear of the room he saw the puzzled look on Chana’s face. Burger didn’t get it either. “This was a World War One submarine. On its bow it had a device naval submarine warfare has long since abandoned. It was called a net cutter, an angled steel support of a row of sharpened toothlike cutters that could shear metal cables that were slightly underwater, used to snare submarines. Those were your teeth. But whatever they hit, even that slight pressure would sink the hulk down under again to come up somewhere else when the pressures and temperature were just right.”

That skeptical voice again. “But it breathed!”

“That small, pitted hole in the bow that decay caused was letting out pressured air. It stopped when the water covered it, then came back when the hole was exposed again.”

“Why didn’t it sink?”

“Because that Kingston valve was still letting compressed air seep out. The buoyancy was nearly neutral.”

There was a new voice now, tinged with a trace of disbelief. “You said... you killed it.”

Hooker found the person, stared at him a second and grinned. “I did,” he told him.

There was more curiosity in the voice this time. He simply said, “How?”

This time Hooker didn’t answer. He simply looked over to where Alley was sitting and nodded. Alley reached up and turned off the lights.

It was black again. It was almost like being out on the sea in total darkness. The sudden change from light to darkness made it blacker still, and no matter what they knew or had heard the smell of fear seemed to come into the room. They all were about to see something they had dreaded and even now didn’t want to see at all. Yet they had to. They had to see it die, positively, irrevocably die a death that could never arise again to terrorize them. They had to be sure. The air was alive with their tension.

And Mako Hooker pushed the button in his hand and the screen boomed into a blank, silvery flower of nearly blinding light. There was a sharp gasp when nothing was there, but before any mutter of discontent was heard, night came again with the suddenness of a blink, then the form appeared, black against even greater blackness, but the camera light gave it stark substance and depth, an eerie monstrous shape giving birth to itself as it thrust up from the water with deliberate slowness. On its nose the deadly form of the huge teethlike wire cutters made it grimace like an unleashed horror, and as the rattle of its ghastly breath came through the sound system, there was the white streak as the projectile from the rocket launcher tore through the night, blasted a hole in the rust-weakened outer shell, erupted into a great twisted hole of mangled metal and let the ocean in to give it a final and complete burial. The hulk began to heel, and then the eye came into view. Hooker stopped the tape and they saw what it was. The 0 on the conning tower had faded. Only the top part was left, like an arched eyebrow. An encrustation below it gave a pupil-like appearance.

Hooker touched the button again. The sound got wilder, a metallic gurgle as the hulk turned, and as slowly as it had appeared it went down.

The light on the screen went blank and everyone sat in the darkness again. There was no sound for a second, then you heard everybody letting his breath out. To himself Mako smiled. He knew how an audience would react. He didn’t need any further proof. He said, “Alley...,” and the lights went on.

The hum of conversation was quiet at first while the thrill of satisfaction held the people of Peolle in its grip. It was dead. The eater was dead and it would eat no more. They knew it for what it was, but to all of them it would always be the eater and great stories would be wound around it, truth and imagination merging to make wonderful things to tell around nighttime fires, and the name of Mako Hooker would be a living thing in everybody’s memory for generations to come.

Now the building was loud with voices. Nobody would be going home until the sun came up, and to one side Billy Bright was trying to be grave about the whole affair, yet he was enjoying the role of hero helper to his boss. He saw Mako grinning at him and shrugged a resignation. Then he was happy too. He saw Judy slip her hand through Mako’s arm, and squeeze a little; then Mako lowered his head and kissed her gently.

Billy Bright didn’t see them leave, but suddenly they were gone.