Chapter Twenty-One: The Real Monster

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind [those eyes], filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.”

-Pippin, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

            “You know,” said Helen. “You brush with death so much you should start making small-talk. You know, ‘hi death, it’s me, Hendricks; just passing through. How’s the family? Still trying to catch Helen?’ That sort of thing.” 

            Hendricks laughed weakly. He was glad she was maintaining her sense of humor.

            “I mean, how many people have ever wrestled with two different sea-monsters and survived?” she went on. “If we get out of this, you’re picking my next lotto number.”

            “Deal,” he said. “Uh, not to get serious again, but we probably should move on just in case that thing finds its way through to here.”

            “Right, lead the way,” she said, nodding in an exaggerated enthusiastic manner.

            “Are you alright?” he asked as they moved along the edge of the tank toward another door.

            “Can you think of any reason why I wouldn’t be alright?” she asked, laughing.

            Hendricks stopped and looked at her.

            “So, that’s a no then?”

            “Yeah,” she said, her smile disappearing. “That’s a no.”

            She was taking very deep, shallow breaths, then, all at once, she buried her face in her hands and began to cry uncontrollably. Hendricks hesitated in shock at the sudden shift in mood, then put a hand on her shoulder. As if it were a trigger, she suddenly threw her arms tightly around him and began sobbing into his chest. Startled, he awkwardly stroked her hair as he let her cry her heart out.

            It took a long time for her to calm down enough to speak again. When she had, though, she stayed where she was, pressed against Hendricks and holding onto him as if she thought she would fall away into nothingness if she let go.

            “I’m sorry,” she managed at last. “I guess I’m making a bit of a fool of myself…”        

            “No,” said Hendricks quickly. “No, it’s natural that you would be upset after all that’s happened.”

            “I’m just so tired,” she said. “So tired of thinking I’m going to die, of expecting to die, and then escaping only to do the whole thing over again. And all the while, I know that it’s only a matter of time before it actually happens, and…”

            “No!” Hendricks snapped. “It’s not! You’re not going to die here.”

            “Of course I am,” she said softly. “I dreamed it. This entire island wants me dead.”

            “That’s enough!” he said roughly. “I don’t care if everyone in the world is trying to kill you, I am not letting that happen, understand? You’re going to get off this island safe and sound and then…whatever you want to do with your life, because you’re going to survive, got it?”

            She didn’t answer right away, but just kept holding onto him and drawing deep breaths.

            “As inspirational speeches go,” she said at last. “I’ve heard better.”

            “Spur of the moment,” he said. “But the point is…”

            “I got the point,” she interrupted. She took one more deep breath and shook her head. “Okay, I’ll…I trust you. But if you’re wrong, I’m going to be very mad at you.”

            “That’s fair,” he said.

            There was a brief pause.

            “Uh, you can…let go of me now,” she said.

            “Right!” he hurriedly took his arms off of her and she straightened.

            “Okay,” she said. “You, uh, were saying something about moving on before I had a small break down?”   

            “Yes! Yes, uh…this way, I think…”

            They moved on, very subdued, picked the nearest door, and went through it into a narrow, metal corridor.

            “By the way, sorry I hit you,” Helen said as they walked. “But, you did promise not to throw your life away…”

            “Well, you know,” said Hendricks awkwardly. “The way I understood it was, that was only if I couldn’t save you and could have gotten away myself. Since Ralph and Hogan were right there, there was a good chance that whichever of us it didn’t get would be safe. I just…thought it’d better be me.”

            “Why you?” she asked a little sharply.

            “Because…well, because I’m the guy for one thing, and everyone knows that it’s better for the guy to die.”

            “That’s stupid!”

            “No, I don’t think so,” said Hendricks. “In any case, it doesn’t feel stupid to me. And I mean, it does seem to be the rule; ‘women and children first’ you know. I think if anyone should be complaining about that, it’d be the men, but I’ve never met one who did. There must be something in the male psyche that finds the whole thing fitting. I’ll have to ask Ralph about it.”

            “Why Ralph?”

            “I don’t know…he’s pretty wise guy. I mean, in the good sense, not the, you know, other sense. He gave me some real good advice last night.”

            “About what?”

            “Er…career advice,” Hendricks muttered. “Anyway, he seems like the guy ask about that sort of thing.”

            “Well, regardless,” said Helen. “I don’t want you exercising your masculine suicidal-heroics complex just for my sake, okay?”

            “If you don’t buy that,” Hendricks said. “There’s also the fact that you’re the one Prosser’s trying to kill because your very existence is a threat to his plans.”

            “Oh, yeah. That,” she muttered.

            “And I mean, if I survive, hey, so what? If you survive, you can help bring his whole scheme down.”

            Helen looked very put out by this and seemed to be marshalling counter arguments.

            “Maybe,” she said. “But look; I don’t think a few dreams are going to mean the difference between victory and defeat, okay? Anyway, that’s not your responsibility…”

            “Yes it is!” He said. “I promised to protect you!”

            “You also promised not to risk getting yourself killed if there was no hope of saving me!” she exclaimed.

            “And I haven’t, have I? We’re both still here.”

            “Yeah, but that’s only by dumb luck! You went within about six inches of getting your head bitten off twice already, when it was just as likely that I’d be next on the menu! You know I don’t want to die, but I also don’t want you to die!”

            “Well, I don’t either!”

            “Look, Hendricks,” she said in a softer voice. “I know I must sound so ungrateful after all you’ve done for me, but…but I just think it would be more ungrateful of me to let you get yourself killed simply for my sake, okay?”

            “I guess…”

            “You promised you weren’t going to do anything suicidal like that again,” she went on. “Now will you please keep that promise from now on?”

            Hendricks looked at her, wanting to argue more, but the expression on her face told him it was useless.

            “I’ll…yeah, okay,” he muttered.  

            “Thank you.”

            They walked on into another holding tank, this one much larger than any of the others.

            “Jeez, how many of these things does Prosser need?” Helen exclaimed, looking around the enormous room.

            “He was planning on making more monsters,” Hendricks pointed out. “These are probably for the next batch or…”

            He stopped suddenly, halfway up the room. This tank wasn’t empty.

            “Back!” He shouted. “Go back…”

            It was too late. As they turned to run, a pair of enormous pink tentacles rose out of the water, wrapped around their waists, and held them both just over the surface of the water.

            They struggled and kicked and screamed, but the tentacles were immoveable. Then they looked down at the monster that held them, and wonder overcame their fear and they stopped struggling.

            It was a giant squid: about a hundred feet long all told, brick-red in color with a light pink underside. But they didn’t immediately notice the size or color. Or rather, they noticed it as background, because what really captured their attention were its eyes. They were the size of car tires, lidless, a brilliant gold in color, but what made them so striking was their age. Hendricks thought he had never really understood the immensity of time until that moment; the endless succession of years piling upon years until you were dizzy with the sheer weight of it. Here, he felt sure, was some relic of an earlier age; perhaps the last of his strange kind, who had lived, unchanging, through untold centuries until it had come, like the light of a distant star caught for an instant in a drop of rainwater, to this moment of regarding them with a kind of mild interest. Even the black pit of its pupil seemed the blackness of a hole, immeasurably deep, which they, mere children, had come to dare to peer into.

            Hendricks knew that he ought to have felt afraid. Yet, somehow, he didn’t. Or at least, the kind of fear he felt was not the kind that he ought to have felt at that moment. It wasn’t the desperate, animal fear of being killed and eaten. It was the silence-inducing eeriness that comes when you visit a very old and very important building, or meet a great man whom you have heard about many times, but had never imagined you would actually stand in the presence of. It was a keen, sudden awareness of how very small, fragile, and clumsy a creature he really was. We are used to using very prosaic and lenient standards for our own self-comparisons. It is quite a shock when we find ourselves confronted with the unmistakably great and venerable; with something that commands our respect in such a way that we could not refuse it even if we dared.

            This creature, the Giant Squid, was something like that. It was so majestic, so ancient, so, in its own way, beautiful that Hendricks found himself reduced to simply gazing upon it in wonder. Neither Prosser nor Nelson nor any other scientist on this island had created this thing; that much was so obvious that it never entered his mind to suppose that they had. Their creatures were grotesques; hideous, bloated monsters that made the skin crawl and the heart falter just to look at. Up until now he had considered this only a side-effect of his fear for his and Helen’s lives, but now Hendricks realized that it was something else; something deeper, more primal in them that had cried out in protest at the sight of those monstrosities.

            Here, on the other hand, was something else entirely. This was the real thing; a genuine, nature-born monster.  It was the difference between the work of a true master and the crude copy of a first-year art student.

            All of this passed through his mind as the squid held him and Helen in its tentacles, regarding them inscrutably. Then, very gently, it raised another one of its tentacles out of the water and touched Helen’s hair with the tip, almost like it was trying to stroke her.

            “Don’t worry,” whispered Hendricks, for Helen looked horribly shaken by this. “I think he likes you.”

            “Why would that make me not worry?” she hissed back.

            The squid took no notice, if, indeed, it could even hear them. It continued to feel her hair with the tip of its tentacle by lifting it up and letting it fall back down over it. It seemed to fascinate the squid, but it was very gentle about it; as gentle as a human hand would have been. Helen, once she got over the initial shock of having her hair played with by a giant squid, actually found the experience rather pleasant, even charming.

            “Um, excuse me,” Hendricks said after a few minutes. “Uh, Mr. Squid? I don’t think you can actually hear or understand me, but, ah, could you maybe put us down now?”

            Helen shot him an amused look as she tried to gently push the squid’s tentacle away from her head. But, to their immense surprise, the squid, after apparently considering for a moment, actually did set them back down on the platform. Whether this was because it had actually understood Hendricks’s question, or simply because it was going to do so anyway he couldn’t tell, but he decided he should act as though it were the former, just in case.

            “Thank you,” he said after a moment’s surprised silence.

            The squid made no answer, but turned over and glided along its tank, waving its tentacles. Hendricks thought for a moment that it had lost interest in them, but then he noticed that it was doing something rather peculiar. It swam all the way to the far end, then turned around and spread its immense tentacles on the side of the tank like a fan. Then, after remaining like that for a moment, it swam back, looked at them with one enormous, ancient eye, then repeated the process.

            “You know,” said Helen. “Call me crazy, but I think he wants to tell us something about that wall. Come on, let’s take a look.”

            Hendricks had reached the same conclusion and followed her. The squid apparently noticed, because he stopped his back-and-forth dance and simply floated alongside them, marking their progress.

            “Hendricks,” said Helen suddenly. “It’s the gate! He wants us to let him out!”

            Hendricks could see this as well. He looked over at her uncertainly.

            “What do you think?” he asked.     

            “I don’t think the poor thing would hurt a fly,” she said. “I bet Prosser locked him up to study his DNA or something nasty like that. Let’s let him go!”

            “It think you’re probably right,” he said. “So how do we open this thing?”

            “There’s gotta be some controls around here somewhere,” she said. 

            They looked around, and sure enough they found a small booth marked ‘Watergate Controls.’ Hendricks tried a few of these until, finally, an alarm sounded and the huge gate began to creak open. 

            “Yes!” Helen exclaimed.

            The squid swam under the still-rising gate, then all of a sudden it swam back.

            “What’s it…”

            It suddenly reached up, wrapped a tentacle around each of them, and whipped them off into the water so fast that the barely had time to cry out in surprise.

            The next second, they were travelling incredibly fast down a dark, underwater tunnel. Water streamed passed them as they bumped along at the end of the enormous squid, which was rocketing down the tunnel with the speed of a torpedo. Helen and Hendricks struggled in its grip, their lungs burning, both asking themselves why they had ever thought they could trust a giant squid…

            But then, before they had quite given themselves up, the tunnel suddenly ended and they were in the dark ocean. The next moment, they had been lifted up out of the water, coughing and gasping for breath, and set on a narrow balcony built into the side of the cliff.

            “Well…” gasped Hendricks as soon as he had wind enough to speak. “I guess that saved us a step.”

            The squid reached out and stroked Helen’s hair one last time. Then it waved (and they couldn’t help waving back), and vanished beneath the water.

            “You know,” said Helen after a long silence. “I had just assumed that the only way you could get monsters was for someone like Prosser to make them. That there weren’t any real monsters, but just some things that someone had come up with in a laboratory.”

            She smiled unexpectedly; a real, genuine smile.

            “I’m glad that I was wrong.”

            

Next Week:

Chapter Twenty-Two: Boa vs. Python