What Lurks Beneath

By the sound of it, the bird was directly overhead. The loud, fast whumping generated by the rotor blades passed down the stairwell into the tunnel, through solid earth and cement walls, to reverberate throughout the passage.

Sturman waited in the dim underground tunnel, near the bottom of the exit stairwell. He could no longer see the netted manta ray, as the aquarium glass began a good hundred feet behind him. A small crowd of people milled on the staircase in front of him, waiting to head up to ground level where they could watch the helicopter bring the manta from the tank out to the ocean. But what the hell was the holdup?

When he had walked away from the glass, the crew in the tank had been standing on the shelf at the edge of the tank, in waist-deep water, to prevent the manta from leaving the net. They might at this moment be fastening the rig to the helicopter’s sling. But still Sturman and the others were being held back.

Up on the stairs, he could see Barbas talking with a police officer. Clearly there was some sort of problem. The bearded owner finally nodded at the policeman, who then walked up the stairs and out of sight. Barbas came halfway back down toward the crowd. His blond, birdlike assistant remained at his side. He raised both hands, waved them in the air. A reporter for what was perhaps a Bahamas television station trained his camera on Barbas.

“Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention? Please.” He shouted at them over the drumming rotors outside. His voice was inflected by some Old World accent.

“I apologize for the delay, but apparently the transport helicopter arrived from a different direction than we had anticipated. There is an approaching storm. The police have informed me that, due to the downdraft from the helicopter, it would be unsafe for us to head aboveground at the moment.”

There were some groans from the VIPs standing near Sturman. He studied the lot of them, so unlike him in their expensive clothes and jewelry, and shook his head. Bunch of entitled pricks. It had to be a hell of a thing in itself to navigate a helicopter in here, near the resort’s huge towers, to make the pickup. Any wind would make it that much harder. But they simply expected a show.

Barbas continued. “Please. If I can finish. Your safety is our top priority. We have two options now. You can move back to the tank, to watch the release from below. Or, if you are willing to wait with me here a bit longer, we may still have the chance to exit the tunnel to watch the helicopter if the captain gives us the green light. The choice is yours. Again, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience.”

A female reporter hurried up the stairs to speak with Barbas, parting the small crowd of people gathered below him, the cameraman at her heels.

Sturman turned to Eric. “Well?”

Eric shrugged. “I guess I’ll wait here. Nothing to see back there now. You?”

Sturman looked back down the tunnel, weighing his options. “I seen plenty of helicopters, and I doubt we’ll be allowed up there in time. I’m headin’ back. Maybe I can find another way out.”

“Don’t get yourself in trouble.”

“Me?” Sturman grinned and turned away from the stairs.

As he headed alone back into the tunnel, the heels of his Western work boots clopped hollowly on the cement. He reached the viewing area a few moments later and walked up to the glass, removing his cowboy hat. If he strained, he could see the helicopter overhead through the distortion of the glass, through the water’s wind-washed surface four stories above him. But there was simply too much chop. No point in watching from here.

He heard a shout, punctuated by a loud slam, and he turned to look down the tunnel. Two younger security guards had burst through the heavy double doors closing off the end of the passageway. The ones that had been sealed off to the public. The ones that led to the shark tank.

A pool of water was spreading beneath their feet, pouring in from the passageway behind them. It was quickly flooding the floor.

The guards splashed toward him, running now. They look petrified, frantic, their white pant legs wet to a few inches above their shoes. Sturman tensed. They were shouting at him in thick Bahamian accents, and he could make out only one word:

One of the guards shoved at him, yelling, as the other man rushed to the recessed door nearby, which by the signs apparently led to a construction zone. He unlocked it and swung it open, flipping a switch inside. Maybe to turn on some industrial sump pump, to clear the water? Then he ran back out and shouted to the other guard beside Sturman, and both men hurried off toward the exit stairwell, leaving the door ajar. Sturman turned and watched the metal doors from which they had come. His instincts told him to leave, now, but he didn’t want to turn his back on whatever they had seen farther down the tunnel.

“To hell with this,” he said.

As the guards’ shouting faded up the tunnel, he turned and began to run after them. Then came another sound: a loud creaking, as of twisting metal, coming from within the aquarium directly beside him.

Sturman stopped and turned to his right, toward the glass. An instant later, there was a loud clang from inside the tank as a round metal grate blew forcefully upward. In the cloud of silted water, an explosion of long, orange tendrils followed, erupting from the manhole-sized opening to wave madly through the water. Fish darted away from the wriggling snakes of flesh, which thickened and squirmed forth and displayed a palette of shifting colors—oranges and browns, mottled grays and streaks of incensed red—as they spewed into the water above the hole.

But they weren’t snakes. They were all part of something else. Something even larger.

Yard after yard of the enormous appendages continued to emerge from the small hole, a living, wet eruption of flesh. The colossal arms spread in each direction, and the slender tip of one struck the thick glass near Sturman, causing him to flinch. The tapered arm clung to the clear surface briefly, using the tiny suckers at its tip before twirling back into the water. The fleshy eruption slowed, stalled. Sturman held his breath.

Then the beast emerged. A gigantic, pulpy sac of flesh that popped through the small hole as if by great force. It quickly ballooned outward to fill the tank.

It looked remarkably similar to the creatures he had spent so much time with. The beast before him had almost the same relative dimensions as a giant Pacific octopus, and was similar in color. It even moved the same. But it was impossibly larger, spanning the tank.

The beast’s bulbous body was the size of a fifteen-passenger van, its writhing arms much, much longer. Sturman felt like Gulliver after he had left the tiny Lilliputians behind and arrived in the next land—where everything around him was greatly oversized. He was a mere mouse, looking out from a crack in the wall into a normal-sized aquarium, at the octopus inside it that barely fit.

He glanced up to where water sloshed madly against the glass above him. There was no gap between the glass and ceiling here. He figured the beast could not seize him, not yet, and although the primitive part of his brain demanded he run, he remained rooted in place. Unable to stop staring. Slowly, it turned toward him.

Above where the arms attached to the body twitched two basketball-size eyes. Golden eyes, seemingly turned sideways and bisected by black horizontal slits. The eyes of a cat. A hunter.

They were looking at him.