As she climbed out of the car, Sam saw that a tarpaulin had already been unfolded on the sand and Curdie’s boat was being dragged up through the shallows, heave by heave, by a dozen people, six either side. It was raining, the drizzling, indecisive rain of spring, and although it didn’t seem heavy she was quickly soaked through. Lightning flickered in the distance, out over the sea, too far to hear the thunder. Half the town was already there; still others were emerging from their cars behind her. By the time she and Ed and Ivy got to the tarp the boat was sliding to a stop.
Their bodies surrounded it, arms reaching to hold still the frame. It was hard to know what the thing in it was, the way it lay there. There was a long part, mostly white, and then there were tentacles, or arms; eventually Sam could make out suckers along them. It was so huge and they were so uncertain of its structural integrity that even when they had got the thing right up to dry land, moving it required some plan, some discussion. Besides that, there was the smell.
Most people had already covered their mouths. Sam inhaled the complex odour, following an impulse to process the information before it was lost. Ammonia and rot and something else, some olfactory intruder. Her neighbours shot her curious looks, a question in them. She covered her mouth, shook her head. She hadn’t seen this happening.
She had seen something like it, though. Bodies lying out across the sand, much worse than this. A smell so terrible that she could hardly breathe. The sea’s unsound retraction.
This was different. Something had changed.
The smell was not overwhelming, but it felt alive. It stretched its tentacles around her face, pressed wetly into every orifice. Her ears were blocked by it. She heard it humming.
It wasn’t just the smell. The creature, the rare giant squid, was singing.
It hummed of its journey. It sang of becoming a ghost of itself in the water, rising and rising from the deep, still self-propelling, but growing weak. Then riding up and down for a time without sinking, touched and tugged by whatever ate it from beneath. Backwards and forwards. The gradual inclination towards death. Stripped of its pinkish skin until it was this yellow-white and slippery thing. A net had swept beneath it and, bonelessly, it had slid from the net and into the belly of this little boat. Now it would have to slide out of that belly, and onto the sheet, and then.
It wasn’t singing. It was dead.
A decision had been made; Sam stepped back as a dozen people lifted one side of the boat and tipped it. The animal slopped gelatinously onto the tarp like a bowlful of overcooked noodles. She could not have said it had a face, exactly, but the way it landed, its one intact eye was pointed right at her. It sat neatly in position, this eye, a glob of black and white the size of a human head. Sam stared back at its huge dead stare. The humming sound was in her mouth, and it tasted like diesel fuel.
‘The King of the Sea,’ Carl said, with some ceremony. They let the boat fall back again. Men and women stood around the tarp, arms folded behind their backs, ready to move as one. It was like a funeral, solemn and public, fragile to the spoilage of sudden laughter.
‘Queen,’ said Curdie. ‘She’s a female.’
Carl frowned. ‘How can you tell?’
Curdie nudged the mantle with his boot. A spill of tiny, pearlescent jellies rolled out across the tarp. Other animals had ripped her open in the water, and she had been dead for a while; her eggs would have been lost anyway. Now they gushed out, followed by a slug of some sticky black substance which must have been ink, though it was much thicker and reeked of tar. Curdie counted her remaining arms and single tentacle, the end of which was chewed to string.
‘Weird smell,’ he said.
So it was not just Sam. No-one else seemed bothered by the humming, but they all raised hands to cover their faces against the odour. The squid had been rotting for days already, and now, exposed on all sides to the air, that process was intensifying. A few flies buzzed around Sam’s face and she brushed them away. Roger took photos on his new digital SLR, unobtrusively circling the group to shoot between bodies. When he passed Sam, he pressed one heavy hand against her shoulder.
‘Let’s get her out of here,’ said Annette.
She had driven the ute down the track through the dunes and backed it as close as she could get to the tarp without getting bogged. Now the tray was open, bags of ice spread out along each side. She’d been on the phone to the museum already; they were on their way. Keep it cold, they’d said. Frozen, if you can. It might already be too late.
They did not have much time.
Sam joined the procession. She reached for a section of wet plastic and walked alongside her neighbours. They hauled the giant up the ramp, dragged her to the trailer on her stretcher. It was like a burial at sea played out in reverse, solemnity turning to euphoria. Young children followed beside them with eyes wide. She wasn’t as heavy as Sam expected, just awkward to lift between them, spreading like liquid. Most of the tiny eggs spilled out on the sand behind her in a mass, joining with the rest of the waste that lay there.
As they lifted, the group compressed, and Sam was shoved aside. She let go, turned to look behind her at the sea. It was shifting in its unrelenting way, reaching and retracting. White peaks formed in the windy distance. Beyond that it became a grey blur, indistinguishable from the sky. It persisted.
At last they had the whole tarp on the tray and quickly wrapped the sides over her. As if at a signal, the rain became suddenly heavy. It ran down over the tarp and into the tray, poured out of the gaps at its edges and into people’s boots. Curdie pulled the cover over quickly, and the rest of them made their way up to the road. The hum was blunted, then went silent.
Ed appeared beside Sam as she was walking, a weight and warmth without words. She expected him to say something, but he didn’t speak. When she got in the back seat of the car, he was watching her in the rear-view mirror, his expression grave.
‘Bit of a surprise,’ said Ivy, buckling her seatbelt. Sam couldn’t see her face, but the tone made her prickle.
Ed cleared his throat, rested one hand briefly on her mother’s knee.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Sam kept her voice even, though her head was churning. But Ivy wouldn’t answer.
Their car followed the road with the rest, the ute moving more slowly through the sand. Ivy did not look at her until they pulled up in front of the pub, and then only smiled thinly and withdrew. On the veranda, a small crowd had already gathered out of the rain, waiting for the spectacle to arrive.
Annette backed the ute into the driveway, and the tarpaulin was lifted into the loading bay, carried through the insulated doors, and placed gently on the polished cement floor of the cool room. Carl had taken all the beer out, stacked it out of the way, and turned the air to freezing. He was the only one who had got used to the temperature; the others shuffled out quickly.
Sam took a seat at the bar with the others, watched Jean pour out instant coffees. Her mother had disappeared into the crowd with Ed, and she did not want to find her.
‘What now?’ asked Carl.
Jean rubbed her upper arms and blew on her fingertips. ‘They’ll bring a freezer truck down from the museum,’ she said. ‘The body isn’t going to last long. They said the cool room won’t be cold enough. They sounded pretty thrilled.’
She took two coffees, handed one to Sam, and tried to give the other to Curdie, who had sat down beside her, but he waved it away and asked for a beer. It was early, still only eight in the morning, but Jean poured him one without comment.
‘That smell,’ he said. He’d been exposed to it for the longest, and maybe it had done something to his brain; he looked confused, like he was in shock. When their eyes connected, he looked away. The coffee smelled strange and sour and Sam couldn’t bring herself to finish it.
‘Are they supposed to smell like that?’ he asked. Jean had already moved down the bar; nobody heard him except Sam. She didn’t know what to tell him.
More beers were handed around, as much for punctuation as refreshment. Children gathered quietly just inside the doors of the pub, a small knot of trespassers under the raffle wheel. They stared through the hall at the glimpse of the cool room doors, afraid to move lest they wake the monster or, worse, alert their parents to their presence in the front bar.
‘Like the plant,’ he said.
Slowly, as the noise in the bar increased, the children crept towards the cool room doors and tried to look through the small high window. The rest of the bar watched Carl shoo them away and out to the street. Only Sam stayed within hearing distance of Curdie, who was on his third beer by this point, and still muttering to himself.
‘Asphalt,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. Like a new-laid road.’
She left him there and went to the front veranda to wait for the museum people to arrive. When they came, there were only three of them, and they didn’t look like scientists at all, just normal people in jeans, t-shirts: two young men and an older woman with long black curls tied back in a ponytail. At first they were excited, but after Carl had let them in to look at the squid itself their faces lost their hope.
It wasn’t in the best condition, the woman in charge explained. A few years ago, it might have been a find, but more squid like it had surfaced in the Southern Ocean that year. All over the world, bodies like this were floating to the surface. No-one was sure exactly why. The museum was running out of freezer space and had been turning new specimens down for being too small, too decayed or too far away to bother retrieving. This one might be too far gone.
Jean pleaded with them; they couldn’t leave it there. The smell of asphalt and decay had filled every corner of the bar already. People were standing outside, watching from the car park. Sam edged closer to listen to the museum people, their low voices in conference; they were obviously uncomfortable being watched. She could still hear that faint humming sound, though it was fading.
‘It’s either absorbing the pollutant or it’s somehow synthesising it,’ the woman told her colleagues.
‘It could be a new species,’ said one of the men, wrinkling his nose. The woman looked sceptical, but didn’t answer.
‘The truck’s already on its way,’ said the other. ‘We might as well get rid of it for them.’
One of the young men interviewed Curdie, taking notes about the location of his find, its condition, on a tablet. When the freezer truck arrived, they all sprang into action. They’d brought their own forklift, and the head scientist drove it out of the truck, spun it, and lifted the chilled body away in one graceful movement, still wrapped up like a parcel in its blue tarpaulin. As she fastened the doors, the creature was closed away at last. Its song was silenced.
Sam felt bereft. Curdie appeared beside her.
‘I never thought I’d see something like that,’ he said into a handkerchief. When he glanced at her, he seemed surprised that she was there. ‘I guess you didn’t either,’ he said.