Spider Legs (4 page)

A vile ammonia odor filled the ship. Garth threw a fire extinguisher at the alien creature, but it continued to come toward Kalinda. It did not hesitate or seem concerned by Garth's movements.

“I'm coming,” Garth said as he stepped closer to grab her. But the spider was too close to Kalinda to allow him to reach her without himself being trampled into human hamburger. The ammonia smell burned their nasal passages, made their eyes
tear. Ridiculously Garth ran to the monster and gave a swift, vicious kick to one of its legs.

“Look out!” Kalinda screamed as the leg responded by shoving Garth into a piece of the mast. His eyes were flecked with pain as he toppled sideways. A spine on one of the legs ripped into him, so devastating that he dropped to the deck, surely feeling pain like nothing he had ever known. As he lay there stunned for a few seconds his mouth worked, and she heard him speak, as from a distance.

“Oh, Kalinda,” he gasped. “I love you, and I will protect you! You can't die, you aren't going to die . . .”

Tears came through her horror as she struggled to her feet, ignoring the lancing pain from her mutilated foot. In the face of this dreadful threat, all he was thinking of was her!

The creature came swiflty up from behind Kalinda. She stepped to one side to let the creature pass and almost blacked out with pain as one of its leg spikes skewered her, its tan and white tip slicing red hot into the flesh of her chest, scraping along her sternum like fingernails on a blackboard and emerging five inches from the point of entry. She twisted with the force of the blow, taking the spine with her. A pain shot like lightning from her chest to her skull. At the same time she reacted instinctively, smashing the knuckles of her stiffened right hand into a softer area right at the creature's leg joint. The spider seemed surprised, but that was about all. It rose slowly above her, its huge black expressionless eyes staring into her own. There was no doubt it intended to consume her.

Garth screamed. Having no weapons aboard the
Phantom
to protect himself and Kalinda, it seemed likely that the monster would succeed in making Kalinda its next meal.

Now the cold water and air was beginning to have an anesthetizing effect on Kalinda. The sea water splashed on her by the spider left her with a fraction of her sense of touch. Her face was numb. She saw Garth look at her, and knew that she seemed more like an apparition, unreal, lost, already on the threshold of death.

Kalinda's heartbeat accelerated as she looked back and up at the creature's multiple bulging eyes. It loomed over her like a giant hideous balloon in a Thanksgiving parade. The balloon resemblance, however, was only superficial: vile black liquid oozed from the creature's pores and several lesions of decay. Kalinda smelled its fetid body as it edged ever closer. Its eyes looked her over with the compassionless, hungry practicality of a vulture. Yet she remained aware of peripheral things. From overhead, gulls swooped in large arcs across a sky filled with vague perpetual clouds.

“Garth—” She ended in a gargle of blood and collapsed to the deck as she began to choke. She could no longer move or talk, yet she remained conscious, able to see and hear. It was as if she had entered another realm, as a nonparticipant. She was aware of what her husband was doing. She wanted to cry to him to get away, to hide in the cabin, to radio for help. She was done for; she knew that. But maybe while the spider consumed her, Garth would have time to save himself.

Garth licked his lips. She knew he had tasted his own blood and realized he had bitten into his tongue. Somehow he managed to get to his feet, dragging his battered body backward. He stood frozen for a moment but then must have remembered that there was a large pole downstairs in the hatch. Perhaps he could wedge this into the pycnogonid's sucking appendage or stab at one of its eyes with it.

She heard him get up and stumble toward the hatch. He grabbed the doorknob, but the hatch door was jammed. “Open, damn you,” he cried. He banged on it. He tugged again, and the door sprang free. He barged in.

Now Kalinda moaned, hoping that Garth could not hear her. She didn't want him to be distracted as he fought to save his own life. Blood was pulsing past the sharp bony spine in her chest. What remained of her shirt was soaked, and she could feel the sticky warmth spreading. She began to feel totally disoriented—and icy cold.

But she remained aware of Garth, hearing his footsteps,
knowing what he was doing. She knew he loved her; she loved him just as passionately, and knew his ways. She could track him by the tiniest sounds and pauses. He quickly surveyed the cabin and found the six-foot pole lying against a life preserver. She knew he was desperate, that her situation was a nightmare beyond anything he had ever encountered. She didn't want to make it worse.

So as the dreadful spider legs closed on her, she didn't even try to scream or struggle. Probably she wouldn't have been able to anyway. She played dead, knowing it was her only chance. It wasn't far from the reality. She let the legs haul her up and away in silence. She remained attuned to Garth, not because she had any further illusion that he could save her, but because his image was her best and fondest link to sanity.

He grabbed the pole and ran back toward the deck. He burst through the cabin door, his face the color of oatmeal. She knew, without seeing. He stood there on deck, trembling with fear. But Kalinda was gone. There was no movement. He looked in all directions, calling out, “Kalinda!” He looked over the rail; the surface of the tomb-deep ocean was opaque, impenetrable.

Garth reached out with his right hand toward the spot where Kalinda last stood. “Kalinda.” He needed to hold her, and she wished she could oblige. “Kalinda?” The mahogany trim on the boat was splashed with blood, and the fabric of some of the sails was sodden and crimson. The desire to find her was so intense that his body began to shake. His legs became rubbery. She knew.

Reality shifted for a few seconds, so there was not even the whisper of a sound. Then the world came tumbling back into focus. There was the muted crack of icicles from the nearby glacier. Swallowing hard, Garth ran back to the cockpit, pulled the door shut, grabbed hold of a microphone attached to the radio and shouted, “Newfoundland radio—this is the schooner
Phantom!
We have no engine. Our masts are destroyed. We need help . . .”

Garth stopped suddenly, too full of sorrow and shock to continue.
He heard the radio squawk a bunch of meaningless noise. After a few minutes he went back on deck, gazed into the sea, and called again: “Kalinda?”

Don't look behind the cabin,
she willed him.

He heard a sound, but did not see what made it. Something flicked forward and landed on the nape of his neck. Everything went dark as he fell into the cabin below.

The last thing he heard came from above. It was the endless cries of seagulls. He was trapped on a ship in a prison of ice and sea.

But perhaps he would survive. The spider hadn't actually killed him. It might forget him by the time it was through with her.

Kalinda, suspended in the absentminded grip of the spider legs, finally let her consciousness ebb. Her one remaining regret, oddly, was that she knew she would never get to tell him the content of his dream.

PART II

Phantom

Hunting

The sea sheltered ample dragons to fuel the nightmares of the entire human race.

—P
ETER
B
ENCHLEY
,
Beast

CHAPTER 6

Head

E
LMO SAMULES, ONE
of the fisheries officers for Trinity Bay, always told visitors that the Island of Newfoundland was a rough coast to make a living on. Recently, however, offshore oil had begun to offer a promise of employment for thousands. Elmo had seen many changes to the area around Bonavista Bay since his boyhood. When he was only three years old, his parents emigrated from Milan to Canada after his father joined an unsuccessful fishing business. After that, the elder Elmo prospered in Bonavista Bay as a shingle manufacturer and later in the lumber business. The younger Elmo's formal schooling was limited to a year, followed by five years of instruction by his mother. He was an entrepreneur at age 17, leading fishing and whale watch boats in Bonavista Bay.

Elmo always loved the sea and had an early and avid interest in fish and other sea life. His interest and exploration of the nearby oceans was helped by his minimal requirement for sleep. Since his teenage days, he acquired the habit of going for long periods of time with little sleep, sometimes requiring a few hours each night to be fully refreshed. Elmo was not unlearned in science; his prodigious reading had carried him through numerous scientific and popular articles on the sea.

Today Elmo was taking Nathan Smallwood, curator of fishes
from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, on a tour of the eastern coast in a fiberglass patrol boat that hopped between wave crests like a flying fish. Smallwood was determining the extent to which oil companies’ submersible catamaran drilling rigs and the huge towers of Petro-Canada drill ships were damaging the local food chain. He was also here to enjoy the beauty of Newfoundland's coasts and rivers.

Physically the two men were very different. Elmo was a large man with muscular arms wedged into a black T-shirt. He could throw a football like a cannon shot, despite an unusual configuration for his fingers. Behind the athletic facade was an encyclopedic mind, a dynamic force. Smallwood, on the other hand, was adjutant in appearance, tall, thin, quiet, swarthy. His light brown walrus mustache complemented his gray-brown hair. He wore stonewashed cotton twill trousers and a tan cotton-canvas workshirt.

They flew past trap skiffs, the traditional 25-foot Newfoundland inshore boats. Elmo waved to a group of young fishermen who hand-hauled gill nets from Trinity Bay. Orange-brown crabs clung tenaciously to the wet nets as they were pulled from the water.

“Let's go see some icebergs,” Smallwood shouted to Elmo.

“Sure.”

They headed out to sea. Elmo pointed upward. Above was a flock of raucous northern gannets, goose-sized birds that were themselves fantastic fishers. Occasionally a gannet plunged into the sea after prey.

Elmo turned off the engine. “You might think that Newfoundland seems a bit primeval, but it has a rich history,” he said. They were now in the area of the iceberg floes. “Maritime Archaic Indians arrived 5,000 years ago to hunt seals and walruses. In 1610, the first Europeans settled on the Avalon Peninsula. Later Britain and France disputed the sovereignty of Newfoundland. I think that was in the 1700s, but today 95 percent of Newfoundland's 582,000 people trace their ancestry to Britain.”

They watched the icebergs gleam intensely blue. “You really can't appreciate the beauty of the ice and snow until you see this for yourself,” Smallwood said in pleased surprise.

They heard roaring and booming from some of the snowy mountains that lined the coast, punctuated by the explosive sounds that the larger icebergs made. Baffin Bay and Greenland were the factories that produced the icebergs of the North Atlantic. Ice sliding down the valleys constantly shoved the preceding ice masses out into the paleo-crystalline seas.

“It's been estimated that some of the ice may be over two hundred thousand years old, having accumulated until it is two miles deep,” Elmo said. “The Labrador Current carries them down past Newfoundland where they encounter water and winds which blow them toward England. The life journey of a Greenland iceberg is about two thousand miles and lasts two years.”

“Now I've seen some of Newfoundland's coast, which is fantastic,” Smallwood said. “But I've had little time to explore the mainland. What's the interior of the Island of Newfoundland like?”

“Well, with the settlements clustered on the coasts, our inland areas are pretty much wilderness solitudes. Lots of nice forests. Caribou often cross our highways.”

They neared Bonavista Bay and had a close encounter with two humpback whales which splashed their small craft with water as they slapped the sea with their tails. They were curious creatures and protected by Canadian law.

“That happens often,” said Elmo. “They seem to take a perverse pleasure in getting us wet.”

“Did you see that big scratch near its tail?”

“No, missed it.”

“I wonder what could have caused it?”

“Ship propeller?”

“The cut looked too straight and narrow to have been made by a propeller.”

Elmo resolved to watch more closely for tails hereafter, because
his guest was right: an unusual scratch on a whale could signify something going on in the deep water, and it was his business to know about it. It was probably nothing, but he preferred to be sure. If, for example, some pleasure craft operator was experimenting with a power harpoon, something would have to be done.

They continued to travel among towering iceberg mountains of white glory. “You know, things live on those icebergs,” Elmo said. “Inch-long ice worms—
Mesemchytraeus solofiugus
—feed on algae and pollen in the tiny air pockets in the ice. The worms were once thought to be mythical.”

“Didn't know you were such a fine biologist, Elmo.” Small-wood was obviously impressed with the big man's zoological knowledge.

“We fisheries officers study a lot,” Elmo said, smiling. Both men seemed to be thoroughly enjoying their time together. They admired a reddish iceberg tinted crimson by a summer-blooming algae. Suddenly something floating nearby caught their attention.

“Look over there,” Smallwood said. “It's a boat. A schooner. Looks damaged.”

“Let's take a look.” As they got closer they could make out the schooner's name,
Phantom.

“What kind of name is that?” Smallwood asked.

“It does seem a bit eerie. You know what the most common boat name is?”

“Tell me.”

“Serenity.”

There were scratches all over the vessel. Some were just an inch long, others a foot or two in length. When they were alongside the schooner, Elmo put down an anchor, threw a rope, and jumped onto the other boat. “Anyone here?” he called.

There was no answer. “Surely not a derelict vessel?” Nathan called, smiling. “I thought those existed mainly in ghost stories.”

“They do,” Elmo agreed somewhat tersely. His eyes tracked grooves in the deck that led to the hatch. A wave of grayness
passed over him, a kind of dark premonition. “I see a lot more scratch marks here,” he yelled to Smallwood. Then he stooped to pick up a camera which rested on the wooden deck. Perhaps it held some clues as to the former occupants of the schooner.

For a few minutes there were no sounds from the schooner. Just silence. The more Elmo studied this, the less he liked it.

“Anything the matter?” Smallwood called from the patrol boat.

“Something's wrong here. Dead wrong.”

“Don't keep me in suspense, Elmo. What do you see?”

But Elmo was not eager to tell what he saw. Not immediately. This was real mischief.

There was blood on the deck. The railing was torn off in places. There were signs of struggles. Heroic ones. A broken mast. A torn off engine. More blood. Something resembling an esophagus.

And there was a human head. A head with carotid arteries still dripping. The head of a woman. A head evidently torn from its missing body with incredible strength.