Michael Bray - Feed

The two men shook hands. ‘Tyler. Nice to meet you.’

Nash flicked his head towards his son. ‘This short-tempered one is my son, Liam.’

Liam nodded at Tyler, showing none of the warmth or friendliness of his father

‘I’m impressed,’ Nash said.

‘Excuse me?’ Tyler said as the bartender set his drinks in front of him and took the empties away along with the money.

‘You look me in the eye when you talk to me. Most people see this and think I’m some sort of leper.’

‘I take people as I find them.’

‘That accent. You’re not a local, are you? You a yank?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Most of the tourists stick to the coastal bars, but something tells me that’s not you either.’

‘No, I’m… well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what I am. I sold everything I own and decided I wanted to travel. Been doing that for a while now and found myself here. I don’t like the tourist places.’

‘I don’t blame you, mate. Too pricey and rowdy. This is a decent spot, though, even though the draft stuff is watered-down piss.’

Tyler grinned. He liked Nash already. Living with such a disfigurement couldn’t have been easy, yet he seemed to be in good spirits.

‘We don’t have time for this, Dad,’ Liam said, giving a mistrustful glance towards Tyler.

‘Of course we do. This isn’t time limited, son. Now go get the drinks in whilst I bring our new friend up to speed and see what his opinion is on this.’

‘Dad…’

‘Another beer for me and whatever you want.’ Nash cut in.

Liam glared at his father, then at Nash before doing as he was told and heading to the bar. Nash watched him go, then turned back to Tyler. ‘He’s a good kid, just stubborn. I can’t say too much as he gets it from me.’

Tyler nodded and sipped his drink.

‘How much did you hear about what me and the boy were saying?’

Tyler shrugged. ‘Nothing really. Something about gold but no details.’

‘Right, right, well, the thing is, me and him are in a bit of disagreement about something and I thought that you, as a neutral, might be able to help us out.’

‘Sure, why not?’ Tyler said, amazed at how quickly he had got used to Nash’s horrific scars.

‘Let me ask you something, mate,’ Nash said. ‘You ever hear of the Devil’s Triangle?’

Tyler shook his head. ‘Should I have?’

‘Probably not. It’s more of a local legend.’

‘What is it?’

Nash looked around and tried to grin again, the effect ghastly. ‘Well, it’s this place about a hundred miles off the coast. An area where people don’t go.’

‘Why’s that?’ Tyler asked, thinking this was starting to sound like the start of a corny ghost story.

‘You heard of the Bermuda Triangle? Surely you know that one.’

‘Yeah, ship graveyard. They say weird things happen there. Magnetic interference or something. Causes boats to lose their way and planes to crash.’

‘Yeah, that’s the one,’ Nash said as Liam returned with the drinks. ‘Well, we got one of those here only we call it the Devil’s Triangle.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘You won’t have,’ Liam said. ‘People down here don’t talk about it. They don’t even take it seriously, which is what I’m trying to tell the old man here.’

Nash raised a gnarled, scar-crossed hand. ‘Hang on a second, you’re getting ahead of the story, son.’

Tyler waited until Nash took a sip of his drink then went on. ‘Anyway, this place, the Devil’s Triangle, people have talked for years about it. It was first reported back in 1877 as a place to avoid because it was dangerous there. Ship graveyard.’

‘Could be shallow waters. It happens.’

Liam grinned. ‘You think nobody would have bothered to check that? The waters there are deep enough. It’s shallow a few miles from the area, but not there. The water is deep.’

‘So what is it? Another magnetic hot spot?’

‘No, that’s the thing,’ Nash said, enjoying telling the story. ‘Ship instruments work fine there. In fact, unlike the one in Bermuda, planes can cross through it fine. It’s the boats that come to harm.’

‘What happens?’ Tyler asked.

‘They sink. Disappear without a trace. It’s a graveyard down there. Wreckage everywhere that has been reclaimed by the waters. Or at least, that’s what the stories say.’

‘How, though? There must be a reason for it,’ Tyler asked.

‘Nobody knows,’ Liam said, ‘although there is a story about the place which I’m sure my father is about to get to.’

‘It’s a true story. Only thing is nobody believes it, my son included,’ Nash snapped.

Tyler waited, reluctant to get involved with the tension between father and son. Both of them sipped their drinks, then Nash went on. ‘Back when I was in the Army, we were on a training exercise out there. Our route took us straight through the Devil’s Triangle. Of course, back then, I was young and brash. Didn’t care for or believe in the stories. We were near the middle of the Triangle when it happened. Explosion from below deck. The boat started to list straight away. Most of us were sleeping, and so by the time we got up, we were already ankle-deep in water.’ Nash’s good remaining eye took on a vacant glare as he recalled the events. ‘We went in the water, forty of us. Some crew went down with the ship. We could see the hole in the hull as it capsized. Something had hit the boat from underneath.’

‘What was it?’ Tyler asked, drink forgotten.

Nash didn’t answer; he stared off into space. ‘There was something in the water. Started to take us, those that were left. We didn’t know if anyone had sent out a distress call, and there were no landmasses we could get to. All we could do was cling to the wreckage and wait for help that we didn’t know was even coming, which was all well and good until we started to die.’

‘Sharks?’ Tyler asked.

‘Just one. A big one. Big enough to sink the boat anyway.’

‘Great whites can grow up to twenty feet in these waters. Even so, that’s not big enough to sink a boat of that size. You said you had forty men on board.’

‘Fifty. Forty went into the water, the rest I’m guessing went down with the ship or couldn’t get out.’

‘Fifty men, so you’d be talking about a boat that was what, a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet long? No shark could do that.’

‘You don’t need to give me the history lesson. I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve dived with the whites and I know how big they can get. This thing, though… It was no great white. This thing was seventy feet, maybe even eighty.’

Tyler smirked and was about to laugh it off when he saw Nash was deadly serious. ‘That’s impossible. Something that big would have been found.’

‘Depends on how you consider big,’ Nash said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘To you or me, a seventy-foot shark is big. Scaled up to the size of the ocean, seventy feet is nothing. Hell, some blue whales reach almost a hundred feet in length, and manage to go about their business. The only reason we see those is when they surface to breathe. Sharks, of course, don’t need to do that.’

‘But people would have seen one.’

‘I’ve seen one,’ Nash snapped. ‘You ever hear of Megalodon?’

Tyler shook his head.

‘It was a shark, identical in almost every way to the modern great white but much bigger. They grew up to seventy feet in length. The official story goes that the last ice age caused them to die out, the cooling of the waters making survival for them impossible. As their prey died, they starved as they were too big and slow to capture the smaller creatures that it would have been forced to feed on, but, we know that story is just not true. Fossilised teeth have been found that date to after the ice age. The Megalodon as a species survived that period.’