Murray Leinster - Creatures of the Abyss

“How far will you go before we swim?” asked Deirdre. “All the lagoon’s perfect. One place is as good as another.”

He cut off the motor.

“Hmmm. There’s a deep place yonder,” he observed. That’s where I went with the aqualung and speared the freak fish. Stay away from it.”

She jumped over in a clean dive. He joined her in the water. She came up, blowing bubbles.

“All right, Terry. What are your troubles?”

“That bolide bothers me,” he told her. “It had a specific destination! It was meant to hit the water over the Luzon Deep!”

She dived again. This time Terry followed her. The underwater world was beautifully bright, with ripplings making everything seem to shimmer because of the changing light. When they came up again Deirdre said, “Funny!”

“It had a purpose!” insisted Terry. “There were others before it, and they had a purpose tool That’s not funny!”

“I didn’t mean that,” said Deirdre. “I meant … just now, under the water… What’s that?”

There was a swirling at the surface, some tens of yards away. It was not the curling eddy made by a fish about to break surface. It was too big a disturbance for that. It looked as if something stirred, barely submerged, but something very large. Terry, staring, thought of a porpoise cavorting just below the ripples. Or perhaps a shark. But sharks and porpoises are too small to have made this eddying. It reappeared.

“Get in the boat!” snapped Terry. “Quick!”

While she climbed in he let himself sink, his eyes open. There was a clouding of the water underneath, where the surface-disturbance had been. It was mud from the bottom which had been stirred up. He could see nothing clearly through it, though nearby and around him he could easily see the colorings of coral and fan sponges, and he could see small fish darting here and there.

He broke surface. Deirdre bent anxiously over the gunwale.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said curtly. “But give me a fish spear.”

“You won’t… ”

“I just want to have something in my hand,” he told her impatiently, “while I look.”

He took the spear she handed him, and sank once more. Again something moved in the deeper part of the lagoon. It was a fretful motion, as if a creature or creatures tried to burrow away from the light shining through the water. Whatever moved, a thick cloud of debris from the bottom floated all the way up to the surface.

Terry came up for air.

“There’s something queer there,” he said shortly. “I don’t know what.”

He went under and swam cautiously nearer to the disturbance. He was within a few feet of the curling cloud of obscurity when something like a gigantic worm came out of it. Or maybe it was like an elephant’s trunk, only no elephant ever had a trunk so huge. It was a dull and glistening writhing object. Its end was rounded. The tip of the worm-like thing must have been a foot in diameter, and it came out of the mud cloud for four feet, then six, then, fifteen feet. It thickened only slightly in that length. It groped blindly in the brightness.

Terry swam back quickly, and the object reared up and made a groping sweep through the clear water. Some peculiar white disks suddenly appeared on the underside of the long tentacle. They looked like sucker-disks, able to grip anything at all. The monstrous tentacle fumbled for Terry, as if guided by the pressure-waves his movements generated.

Terry froze. Deirdre moved in the boat almost directly overhead. Something clanked in the boat and he heard it. The boat was probably rocking, making the pressure-waves that a creature from the abyss would depend upon for guidance where eyes would not serve at all.

The thick, bulging tentacle reached toward the sound at the surface, now ignoring Terry, though he was nearer. He was still. The white sucker-disks on its under side had several rings of a horny, tooth-like substance at their rims. The smallest were about four inches wide. The fumbling object felt blindly in the water. Deirdre stirred again in the boat. The visible portion of the groping monstrosity was already longer than the boat. The whole creature would be enormous! If this groping arm rested upon the gunwale of the boat, it could easily swamp it.

It groped for the boat, coming horribly out of a cloud of mud. It reached out. In another instant it would touch…

Terry plunged his fish spear into the worm. It jerked violently. There were enormous thrashings. Other similar white-disked arms thrust into view, fumbling somehow angrily for the creature—Terry—which had dared to attack it.

He darted for the surface. Something unspeakably horrible touched him, but it was the smooth and not the suckered side of the groping worm. Terry’s head was now above water. He grasped the gunwale to pull himself in, in a fever of haste. But the thing that had touched him before came back. It grazed his leg, for just a second. Where it touched, his flesh burned like fire.

“Start… motor!” gasped Terry. “Get away!”

Something touched the stern-board of the boat. Deirdre pulled the starter of the motor.

“Get in!” she said tensely. “Quickly!”

She saw him, straining every muscle by pure, agonized instinct against the irresistible force of whatever clung to his skin. The horrible tentacle stretched, and part of its length took a new grip. It crawled upon him… Deirdre saw the look on his face.

She snatched up the second spear and stabbed past him, into the crawling beast. There was a most violent jerking. She stabbed again. She panted. She gasped. She stabbed and stabbed, sobbing with fear and horror. And Terry tumbled in over the gunwale, released. As soon as he fell onto the floor-boards he painfully dragged himself toward the motor at the stern. Something bumped the boat underneath. Terry pulled the starter and the motor suddenly roared. But the boat didn’t start immediately, and it jerked once more. The whirling propeller-blades had touched one of the groping tentacles and cut it. Tumult arose.

The boat surged into motion and Terry, with clenched teeth, sent it into a crazy, skidding turn to avoid a surface swirl, and then another frantic swerve when something showed momentarily above the surface. The boat zig-zagged along. A grisly, writhing object rose above the water, flailing, a fish-spear sticking in it. The small, skimming boat dodged and twisted at its topmost speed… It suddenly straightened out and almost flew across the water toward the land.

Echoes of the outboard’s roaring motor came back from the trunks of palm trees that lined the lagoon’s shore as the tiny boat raced across the water. Deirdre was ashen-white. She turned her eyes from the water, and they fell on the round raw places on Terry’s leg where the sucker-disks had bruised it horribly. She shuddered. She still had the sensation of being pursued by the monster. Back where Deirdre’s spear had finally liberated Terry, startled and convulsive motions continued, followed by a final gigantic splash. Terry drove the boat on at top speed.

The monster sank again in the spot where the lagoon was deepest. It had come from depths where there was no light; from an abyss where blackness was absolute. Now, having lost its victim, it returned peevishly to such darkness as it could secure.

Terry said curdy, as the small boat raced for the Esperance and the wharf, “That creature was driven up from the Luzon Deep into the lagoon to replace the gadget-carrying fish we speared!”

Deirdre stammered a little.

“Your l-leg… You’re bleeding…”

“I’m pretty well skinned in a couple of places,” he said shortly. “That’s all.”

“Could it be poisonous?”