Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

Palpable fear chokes me. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the anger I saw on his face when he slammed the newspaper down—maybe it’s the stakes of this dangerous game—maybe it’s the size of the counterfeiting operation they’re running—maybe it’s from watching too many movies, or from running from the guard at the gate, or from breaking into the lighthouse, or from all the secrecy, but I fear that Ness might kill me if he reaches me. I can’t explain the terror, but it’s real. Like the panic in the submersible. The surety that my life is in jeopardy.

I pull out my phone while I run, need someone to know what happened to me. No signal. The battery alert is flashing. I put it away, can’t run while operating it anyway. Ness is gaining, and my lungs are burning. There’s the inexorable tug of him reeling me in; his house is too distant, and I know there’s no hope, nothing I can do, that I should just stop and give up, but I run and run until he is right behind me, until I can hear him panting, can hear his feet slapping the sand, so close that I dare not turn and look, until he is right upon me, until he tackles me.

His arms wrap around me, and he twists so he takes the brunt of the fall. The air goes out of me anyway. I make the decision to fight, to not let him take me without a struggle, but I can barely breathe, can barely move, and Ness has me pinned on my back, straddles me, is breathing hard himself, and I kick and try to throw my knees into his back.

“What’s gotten into you?” Ness pants.

“You’re hurting me!” I scream. I twist my head to see if anyone will come for me, if Vincent or Monique might be able to hear me from the house.

“Stop fighting and I’ll let you go,” he says.

“If you would have let me go from the beginning—” Deep breaths. “—I wouldn’t have to fight you.”

I bring my arms close to my face, dragging his hands with me, and sink my teeth into his wrist.

Ness curses and lets go of me. I try to kick away from him. He pins me down again.

“I’m the one mad at you , remember? What the hell are you upset about?”

“You’re a phony,” I spit at him. “Everything about you is fake.” I take deep breaths. “Your smile, your damn shells, the trees, everything!”

I get a hand free and swing the murex at his face. The sharp crenelations open a gash. Ness covers his cheek, and I wiggle away. I stagger a handful of steps, wait for him to tackle me again, but he just sits there. I head for the house. My legs are jelly. I can barely stand, but I resolve to get there, to get help. Looking back, I can see that Ness hasn’t moved, is just holding his wound, watching me.

I take advantage of this and pause to collect my breath. I rest my hands on my knees and eye him like a wounded mouse might eye a hawk.

“What did you think I was going to do, write you into some kind of hero?” I ask.

He stares at me.

“And then you dump your shells on the market, right? Or have you been doing that already? How many of your celebrated finds happened right up there in that lab?”

I stagger toward the house. Checking my phone, I see the battery is dead. I don’t care. I feel dead, too. Emotionless. Betrayed to the core.

“This is not a fake!” Ness roars behind me. I turn to see him holding the shell in one hand, his cheek in the other. He gets to his feet, and I steel myself to run again.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” He raises his voice above the crashing sea and the wind. “Skipped right to the end, and you still don’t understand.”

“Stay away from me,” I tell him.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ness says. “Not like you’ve hurt me.”

I don’t know if he means the story that ran that morning or the gash on his cheek. I no longer have the right to say it wasn’t my fault. Both wounds were. I know that. I made a promise I couldn’t keep.

“Let me off your property,” I plead. “I don’t know what’s going on up there, but I know it isn’t legal. Let me go.”

“You think I would hurt you? Goddamnit, Maya, I think I’m in love with you.”

“Shut up!” I scream at him. “Don’t say that. You don’t get to say that.” I cover my ears and jog toward the house. When I look back, Ness is running after me. It’s no use. My legs give out, and I tumble to the sand. Ness circles in front of me and falls to his knees. Tears are streaming down his face, blood down his cheek.

“Listen to me,” he begs. “Just listen.”

I bow my head, stay on my hands and knees, try to fill my lungs.

“No, it’s not legal what we’re doing. We’re trying to clear some hurdles, make it legal, but it hasn’t been easy.”

“You’re going to crash the market for shells,” I tell him.

“Yes, we are. I aim to. Because we’re going to bring them back. Don’t you see?” He shows me the murex. Its white shell is pink with his blood. Ness peers inside, touches the slug, and I see the creature move. Ness turns and hurls the shell into the sea. He sits back on his heels, wipes the blood from his cheek.

“I used to shell beaches as a little boy with my grandfather, and he told me once that we collect dead things. That the shells are worthless, but we collect them because they’re beautiful.” Looking up, he smiles at me, even though his eyes are still crying. “Another metaphor for your collection,” he says. “How shelling is like love. Collecting empty, pretty things.”

I don’t say anything. I conserve my energy.

“After he told me this, I started looking at the living creatures inside. I followed the shells with snorkels and then dive tanks. Grew up. Never forgot what he said. And one day, I went down in a Mir to oversee a geothermal installation, and I started thinking about the vents, where the water is toxic and warm. Acidic, like we’ve made the sea. But there was life there. Trapped. It couldn’t populate the rest of the sea because of the cold all around it. The animals there were boxed in, fit for a different world, for a world not of sunlight but of harsh chemistry. I wondered if we could bring them out, give nature a nudge, find something in their DNA that might help.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”

“We started with the trees because they were simple and we could grow them quickly. I hired the absolute best. From what we learned with the trees, we were able to get two dozen species of gastropods living in existing sea conditions. And more on the way. The FDA thinks we’re working on algae for biotic oil production, that our proposed bills to relax some regulations have to do with that. There are politicians on our side, but others who will shut us down if they find out, who will think we’re playing God, creating little Frankenstein fish, that we’ll cause more damage than we’ll repair. But we’re only doing what nature does best. She just needs our help. Because we took her by surprise.”

I don’t want to believe him. I don’t care how it all fits, how this makes more sense than the monster I made up in my mind. I want to believe in the monster. I need to believe in the monster. It’s simpler. I can wrap my head around that. It’s more difficult to think that Ness is out to save the world. It’s more difficult to think that he sees anything in me.

“The feds are onto you,” I say. I want him to know he won’t get away with this, that it’s too late.

Ness nods. “I know. I think they suspect. They don’t want this either. If the market for shells crashes, entire departments will get shuttered overnight. It’ll be like the end of prohibition. No more jobs for the people who track down crooks. No more retail. No sales tax. All gone overnight. No one wants this, don’t you see? It’d be like turning the loch back over to the monster. The circus would have to pack up and go home.”