What Lurks Beneath (27 page)

B
y the sound of it, the bird was directly overhead. The loud, fast whumping generated by the rotor blades passed down the stairwell into the tunnel, through solid earth and cement walls, to reverberate throughout the passage.

Sturman waited in the dim underground tunnel, near the bottom of the exit stairwell. He could no longer see the netted manta ray, as the aquarium glass began a good hundred feet behind him. A small crowd of people milled on the staircase in front of him, waiting to head up to ground level where they could watch the helicopter bring the manta from the tank out to the ocean. But what the hell was the holdup?

When he had walked away from the glass, the crew in the tank had been standing on the shelf at the edge of the tank, in waist-deep water, to prevent the manta from leaving the net. They might at this moment be fastening the rig to the helicopter's sling. But still Sturman and the others were being held back.

Up on the stairs, he could see Barbas talking with a police officer. Clearly there was some sort of problem. The bearded owner finally nodded at the policeman, who then walked up the stairs and out of sight. Barbas came halfway back down toward the crowd. His blond, birdlike assistant remained at his side. He raised both hands, waved them in the air. A reporter for what was perhaps a Bahamas television station trained his camera on Barbas.

“Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention? Please.” He shouted at them over the drumming rotors outside. His voice was inflected by some Old World accent.

“I apologize for the delay, but apparently the transport helicopter arrived from a different direction than we had anticipated. There is an approaching storm. The police have informed me that, due to the downdraft from the helicopter, it would be unsafe for us to head aboveground at the moment.”

There were some groans from the VIPs standing near Sturman. He studied the lot of them, so unlike him in their expensive clothes and jewelry, and shook his head. Bunch of entitled pricks. It had to be a hell of a thing in itself to navigate a helicopter in here, near the resort's huge towers, to make the pickup. Any wind would make it that much harder. But they simply expected a show.

Barbas continued. “Please. If I can finish. Your safety is our top priority. We have two options now. You can move back to the tank, to watch the release from below. Or, if you are willing to wait with me here a bit longer, we may still have the chance to exit the tunnel to watch the helicopter if the captain gives us the green light. The choice is yours. Again, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience.”

A female reporter hurried up the stairs to speak with Barbas, parting the small crowd of people gathered below him, the cameraman at her heels.

Sturman turned to Eric. “Well?”

Eric shrugged. “I guess I'll wait here. Nothing to see back there now. You?”

Sturman looked back down the tunnel, weighing his options. “I seen plenty of helicopters, and I doubt we'll be allowed up there in time. I'm headin' back. Maybe I can find another way out.”

“Don't get yourself in trouble.”

“Me?” Sturman grinned and turned away from the stairs.

As he headed alone back into the tunnel, the heels of his Western work boots clopped hollowly on the cement. He reached the viewing area a few moments later and walked up to the glass, removing his cowboy hat. If he strained, he could see the helicopter overhead through the distortion of the glass, through the water's wind-washed surface four stories above him. But there was simply too much chop. No point in watching from here.

He heard a shout, punctuated by a loud slam, and he turned to look down the tunnel. Two younger security guards had burst through the heavy double doors closing off the end of the passageway. The ones that had been sealed off to the public. The ones that led to the shark tank.

A pool of water was spreading beneath their feet, pouring in from the passageway behind them. It was quickly flooding the floor.

The guards splashed toward him, running now. They look petrified, frantic, their white pant legs wet to a few inches above their shoes. Sturman tensed. They were shouting at him in thick Bahamian accents, and he could make out only one word:

Lusca
.

One of the guards shoved at him, yelling, as the other man rushed to the recessed door nearby, which by the signs apparently led to a construction zone. He unlocked it and swung it open, flipping a switch inside. Maybe to turn on some industrial sump pump, to clear the water? Then he ran back out and shouted to the other guard beside Sturman, and both men hurried off toward the exit stairwell, leaving the door ajar. Sturman turned and watched the metal doors from which they had come. His instincts told him to leave, now, but he didn't want to turn his back on whatever they had seen farther down the tunnel.

“To hell with this,” he said.

As the guards' shouting faded up the tunnel, he turned and began to run after them. Then came another sound: a loud creaking, as of twisting metal, coming from within the aquarium directly beside him.

Sturman stopped and turned to his right, toward the glass. An instant later, there was a loud clang from inside the tank as a round metal grate blew forcefully upward. In the cloud of silted water, an explosion of long, orange tendrils followed, erupting from the manhole-sized opening to wave madly through the water. Fish darted away from the wriggling snakes of flesh, which thickened and squirmed forth and displayed a palette of shifting colors—oranges and browns, mottled grays and streaks of incensed red—as they spewed into the water above the hole.

But they weren't snakes. They were all part of something else. Something even larger.

Yard after yard of the enormous appendages continued to emerge from the small hole, a living, wet eruption of flesh. The colossal arms spread in each direction, and the slender tip of one struck the thick glass near Sturman, causing him to flinch. The tapered arm clung to the clear surface briefly, using the tiny suckers at its tip before twirling back into the water. The fleshy eruption slowed, stalled. Sturman held his breath.

Then the beast emerged. A gigantic, pulpy sac of flesh that popped through the small hole as if by great force. It quickly ballooned outward to fill the tank.

An octopus.

It looked remarkably similar to the creatures he had spent so much time with. The beast before him had almost the same relative dimensions as a giant Pacific octopus, and was similar in color. It even moved the same. But it was impossibly larger, spanning the tank.

The beast's bulbous body was the size of a fifteen-passenger van, its writhing arms much, much longer. Sturman felt like Gulliver after he had left the tiny Lilliputians behind and arrived in the next land—where everything around him was greatly oversized. He was a mere mouse, looking out from a crack in the wall into a normal-sized aquarium, at the octopus inside it that barely fit.

He glanced up to where water sloshed madly against the glass above him. There was no gap between the glass and ceiling here. He figured the beast could not seize him, not yet, and although the primitive part of his brain demanded he run, he remained rooted in place. Unable to stop staring. Slowly, it turned toward him.

Above where the arms attached to the body twitched two basketball-size eyes. Golden eyes, seemingly turned sideways and bisected by black horizontal slits. The eyes of a cat. A hunter.

They were looking at him.

S
he saw something looking back at her through the flat, clear surface. Like the surface in the other lagoon. It was another of the unusual, sinewy prey.

Her arms worked independently to assess the tank, quickly wriggling into every corner, every nook, sending information back to her complex brain. The taste of prey was strong here, and concentrated near a platform of very shallow water. One arm tip slid up onto the platform, met with something moving, which moved away from her touch. She had tasted it.
Flesh.

But she was not hungry.

The great octopus had pressed herself through the pipe, seeking the deep ocean. Seeking to return to the darkness, the quiet of her den. Yet she had merely entered another small, shallow lagoon. Was still confined, with bright daylight upon her, blinding her. And now the noise from above was even louder. The threat nearer.

She ignored the tank's sea life, which darted away from her, and flattened her enormous body against the odd corals beside her, trying to mimic their colors and textures to conceal herself. But it was too bright here, and there was not enough room. She was too agitated to control her camouflage. The painful noise grew louder.

The deep vibrations from above escalated, and the pain became unbearable. One of her arms, the one she had sent slithering up to taste the prey on the shallower flat above her, felt something lifting, moving upward. Over her.

She could not escape. She was in danger.

Her body expanded, filling with oxygenated seawater. Her skin blossomed in thick veins of red and brown, and her muscles tensed.

 

 

The huge octopus was no longer looking at Sturman. He watched in awe as the monstrosity pressed against the far side of the aquarium, somehow changing a moment later into the rigid rock itself. Its flesh took on the colors, the textures of the man-made reef. Despite his fear, he was entranced.

The creature paused momentarily, as if to hide. But then its body again began to change shape, bulging outward in places, caving in in others, and rapidly reverted back into a fluid, moving mass, thinning out its flesh into a great canopy that shadowed the lower portion of the tank. Like a massive sheet billowing free of a clothesline in the wind, the octopus's webbed body undulated to the center of the tank, then stilled and sank. It pressed its body against the bottom, looking up. Distancing itself from the surface.

The helicopter.
It was frightened by the sound of the helicopter.

Sturman remembered. The manta release, the helicopter. The capture team.

There were people in the tank, right now, gathered on the platform above the octopus, only their legs visible below the waterline. They probably had no idea what was moving right below them.

He pounded the glass with both palms, shouting. But they remained, only their legs visible, as the sound of the helicopter grew louder. Nobody ran. Of course, they wouldn't. They would be facing the net right now, heads above water and eyes focused on the manta ray, or on the sky, and would see nothing below. Hear nothing, especially over the drone of the helicopter.

A shout came from off to his left, where the long staircase came down into the tunnel. He turned and saw motion in the shadows of the high-ceilinged corridor. A group of people. Ashley, her boss, and a few others, a few hundred feet away were moving toward him, from the stairwell. Leading them was one of the guards he'd seen before.

“No! What are you doing?” he shouted, waving his arms at them. “Go back!”

They kept coming. Apparently, they couldn't hear him. Or they were ignoring him. And they clearly couldn't see what was in the tank beside him.

He started toward them. The sound of the helicopter's rotors thundered into the passageway now. He gestured madly, yelled, but still the small group approached the tank. They couldn't see inside the glass from so far away, from such a sharp angle. With Ashley, Barbas, and the guard were the blond assistant and the heavyset resort worker, and running after them was a young boy with curly brown hair, chased by an older woman who appeared to be his grandmother.

Through the glass next to Sturman, past the waves on the surface, the net began rising out of the water. Even through the chop, within the net's circular yellow outline, the diamond-shaped silhouette of the manta was visible as it passed through the waves. It disappeared as it rose into the air. The net moved out over the tank, directly over the octopus, the rotor wash of the roaring helicopter above it churning the water.

Suddenly, the octopus appeared to grow in size, swelling. It lifted off the bottom and moved toward the thick glass that separated them. Toward the others, now only thirty feet away.

“Run! Get out of here, goddammit!”

They ignored him again, but this time for a different reason. They had now seen it. First to scream was the heavyset woman in resort attire, followed by the grandmother.

Ashley's eyes widened, and she covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, my Lord.”

“What
is
that?” the boy said.

The tunnel grew darker, as when the sun disappears behind a cloud. Sturman turned and looked back toward the aquarium. The great octopus was up against the glass, covering the smooth, clear surface.

The obstruction on the opposite side of the glass became more defined in the dim overhead lights. Pale shapes emerged. Dimpled circles, of all sizes, that were pressed against the glass inside the tank.

Suckers.

Like some massive, fluid fresco, alternating between wavy lines of flesh and rows of hundreds of the suckers, some as large as car tires, the bizarre image slid along the glass, obstructing the light outside. Changing shape. A few people murmured in awe.

In the middle of the glass, where the rows appeared to converge in a single dark point, a large blob of brownish-black flesh pressed forward against the glass. Symmetrical lines traced outward from the dark point, in a star-like pattern. The point began to expand, a dark circle materializing in the pulpy body. The circle, like some great pupil, began to dilate. It grew outward until it was bigger than all but the largest suckers. The dark spot changed shape. A huge, parrot-like beak, dark as onyx, slid free from a sphincter of muscle. And struck the glass.

Sturman turned and grabbed Ashley's arm. “Show's over. We need to get out of here. Now.”

She looked at him, mouth agape. She appeared to be in shock.

“My God. Is anybody filming this?” Barbas asked. He laughed. “Amazing!”

His blond assistant obediently took out her smartphone and pointed it toward the octopus.

Tap-tap.
The sound of the huge beak striking the glass was louder now.

“Don't worry,” Barbas said. “This glass is shatterproof. It is unbreakable.”

But Sturman knew it wasn't designed for this. He turned and spread his arms around the group, shoving them back from the glass, herding them back toward the distant exit. The grandmother clutched at her chest, dropped to her knee.

“Nana?” the boy said. “Nana, run!”

Sturman grabbed him by the arm. The boy fought as he dragged him away.

Tap.
Harder now. The sound changed as the blows increased in force.

Sturman heard a hissing sound. A stream of pressurized water spurted into the tunnel in front of them, through a narrow crack in the shatter-resistant glass.

As he struggled to drive the group toward the distant stairs, in unison they finally began to move of their own accord. But then another fire-hose stream of water erupted from the glass. It blasted across the tunnel, striking the blond woman and knocking her off her feet. Then another jet of water spilled out, near the others, shaped like a fan.

They weren't going to reach the exit. And the closed double-doors behind them, farther down the tunnel, only continued deeper underground.

There was nowhere to go.

 

 

Outside, the small crowd cheered as the helicopter tilted forward and picked up speed, heading out past the reef. The manta ray, suspended a hundred or so feet below it inside the circular net, looked as flat as a pancake. There was a distant rumble of thunder and Eric looked past the helicopter toward the east, where lightning flashed inside the dark clouds.

They had beaten the storm. It had gone well, and Eric was happy for the animal. In a minute, the pilot would lower it down into the waves and gently release it back into the wild.

Moments ago, right before the helicopter had started to rise with its cargo, the police officer had finally allowed Eric and the others waiting in the underground stairwell to exit the tunnel to watch the scene aboveground unfold. At that same moment, he'd heard shouting behind him and seen two guards rush up from below, looking upset—frightened, even—to find Barbas. As Eric had followed the larger group out of the tunnel, unable to stop as he was pushed along by those behind him, he'd glanced back in time to see Ashley turn and walk back down the stairs with Barbas and the guards.

“What
is
that?”

A round man next to Eric was tugging at his wife's sleeve now, pointing down into the water inside the immense aquarium. The man's wife shrugged him off, still watching the helicopter depart like everyone else.

“You don't see that?” the man said to her. He turned to Eric. “Do
you
? Or am I seeing things?”

“See what?”

Eric looked where the man was pointing. He gazed down into the tank, past the small group of aquarists in wet suits on the ledge where they had held the manta in place. The exposed surface of the water was just below Eric, but the bottom was forty feet down, and the water was choppy from the helicopter, so it was like looking down at one of the island's coral reefs from a boat.

Still, something did look odd.

Through the subsiding waves sloshing at the capture team's midsections, in the much deeper water behind them, he saw a large shadow. A shape near the bottom, up against the high wall of glass that faced the underground tunnel. He couldn't make out what he was seeing, through the refracted light and the choppy surface, but it appeared as though . . .

There.

Yes. It
moved.
The shape, much, much larger than the departed manta ray, had moved. The huge shape underwater was pulsing.

“You do see it!” the man said.

Eric pushed a few gawkers aside and hurried around the waist-high rock wall for a better vantage point. He hurried off the path into some greenery. He stopped right at the edge of the pool, next to a wire barrier built onto the rock wall to keep tourists from jumping into the tank. He placed his hand on the wires.

And with each pulse of the shape below, he felt something in the taut wires. A vibration. A pounding, in cadence, like somebody swinging a sledgehammer into a wall.

Suddenly, the air was filled with a tremendous whooshing sound. The water level in the tank began to visibly drop, as though it was an enormous bathtub and some great plug had been pulled below.

There was a tremendous crack, and Eric jumped backwards. The force of the moving water had separated a forty-foot-tall section of the wall from its mountings. In seconds, millions of gallons of roaring water plunged to displace the air in the tunnel beneath the tank. The crowd began to run away, screaming.

The six-inch-thick glass panel leaned over and stopped, tilted at an angle over the tank as water rushed around it. The massive, dark shape in the water moved. It slid under the leaning wall, forced through by the water flooding the tunnels.

Quickly, the water level in what had been the tank dropped two full stories below its previous level, leaving the fake corals inside exposed. There was another cracking sound. He looked at the far side of the aquarium, toward the natural rock that separated it from a small lagoon. A breach had now occurred there as well. More water was now pouring back into the tank from the other side, refilling it.

Where moments ago an aquarium had been, there was now only an extension of the lagoon. And the viewing tunnels had disappeared entirely under the surface, hidden by swirling, silt-laden water.

Ashley. Sturman.

They were down there. Eric turned and ran toward the underground stairwell.