Carole Johnstone is originally from Scotland and now lives in north Essex, England. Her short stories have been published in Black Static and several anthologies including Voices, Grants Pass and Dead Souls, and the forthcoming Catastrophia and Close Encounters of the Urban Kind. Her first novella, Frenzy, was recently published. Her website can be found at www.carolejohnstone.com
They had made good time, at least. These days, Lachlan took his luck wherever he could find it, and a three-knot south-westerly in a cloudless January sky was just that. Never mind that the cod always waited for the kind of storm that gave Lachlan palpitations. The Relict was only two days out of port. They weren't fishing yet.
He had never much aspired to be a fisherman, but had come last in a stoically long line of them. Years spent at sea with his father had instilled in him both knowledge and a cast-iron stomach that only the old stalwarts could better. He could cast and haul, clean and gut. He could sense a storm over the horizon and the contents of a net haul by the creak of winch and drum. But he had no love for any of it. Not fishing, not boats. And never the sea.
"Blackhall, get yer arse astern and see to the bloody floats. I'm no paying ye to stare at the fuckin' sky, laddie!"
The skipper was just a head and a muscled arm thrust out of the small window of the forward wheelhouse, but Lachlan moved quickly towards the working deck, where the rest of the five-man crew were already examining the net and its warps. The Relict's first-mate, a weather-beaten casualty of the North Sea named Irvine, eyed Lachlan's approach with something near to kind contempt.
"Best no' get on the wrong side ae Gibson this early on, pal. He only took ye on at all because ye were first on Peterheid dock."
This was Lachlan's first trip on The Relict. It was his first crew job on the high sea. He had spent his entire career onboard the pelagic fleets that hugged the Scottish coast. But demand for herring and mackerel had dropped, while deep-sea cod rarely fell out of favour, despite decreased quotas. And as much as Lachlan might resent it, getting a place aboard The Relict had been a lucky break for him. The first in a very long time.
They finally dropped anchor close to the Continental Shelf Boundary with Norway. Here, the sea was black and uneasy, its swells frilled with white foam. Lachlan looked to the sky as they prepared to cast. It was slate grey and hung heavy with cloud. A low winter sun occasionally blinded in watery refractions. He hoped that the cod would be merciful. All that empty sea with no land to orientate it was a little too unnerving. A little too alien.
The Relict was a stern trawler, its single net set and hauled behind two weighted otter boards attached to towing warps. While Irvine operated the net drum and winches close to the gantry, Lachlan helped feed the vast net, its floats and cookie weights over the ramp and stern, trying not to look much beyond their own pocket of dark sea. The wind picked up as the last of the net disappeared, the heavy otter boards following. Lachlan suffered an uncommon lurch of nausea as the twin towing warps sunk down under the viscid surface.
Irvine's grin was wide and mostly toothless. He slapped a thick hand against Lachlan's shoulder, shaking his stomach further loose of its moorings.
"Welcome to the Devil's Hole, Lackey."
Lachlan let what was swiftly becoming a tired joke pass, if only because the location rang a bell inside those reluctant archives long planted inside his head. "Christ, no-one told me we were—"
Irvine's weathered face set like cement. "This is a God-fearin' boat, son. Only the skipper's allowed tae curse Him and ye kens it!"
The loudest chuckle came from a crew-hand named Robert MacKenzie. MacKenzie was the kind of career deckhand that Lachlan would have gone out of his way to avoid on dry land; the kind that pissed away his pay and took it out on hapless lubbers at pub closing. He worked the iceboxes and trawl doors alongside his equally amenable brother. Lachlan had no clue what his name was. They were Bert and Ernie on The Relict. The other crewman: a perpetually silent, bearded man carrying maybe fifty pounds too many, had been christened Bob. Clearly there were more important things to do aboard The Relict than waste imagination. Like casting net and gear more than 130 fathoms down into one of the most notorious trenches within the North Sea.
"Ye're no midwater trawlin' now, Lackey," Bert grinned. "Skipper says he's seen a bloody great shoal ae cod on the sonar, we drop the trawl tae the bottom and haul 'em in."
When the engines started again, Lachlan hid his startled jump in a loud cough. Cold wind slapped his hair against his face, scratching his eyes. The deck vibrated under his feet in a nasty hum. The boat's engines momentarily stalled, then roared louder, taking up the slack. The Gilson winches groaned, and the drum drew the warps tight. They began to pull.
Lachlan hated bottom-trawling. Hated the very idea of it: of a vast weighted net dragged over rock and corpse and wreck. There were too many obstacles—too many perils waiting deep down where they could never be seen. Waiting to snag or stall. Waiting to sink.
At five a.m. they started bringing the net in. Aside from their tiny island of light, the world was dark and formless. The expectant gulls and gannets invisibly flocked and dived, their caws loud and unwieldy. The wind whipped around their heads, creating wailing echoes around the wheelhouse, and railing against the gantry and aerial mast above their heads. Lachlan again suffered under the weight of a foreboding that was as lethargic as it was certain. The beginnings of a downpour spattered hard against his oilskins, as Irvine signalled the winding of the net drum with a warning shout.
Slowly, the towing warps reappeared, dragging the otter boars behind. The smell of the sea grew stronger, as if they had dredged its bed clean: salt, fish, and something else—an odour that was as earthy as it was alien.
Standing close to the stern doors, Lachlan helped secure the weighted ground line at the net's beginning, while Bob took care of the foot rope's luminous floats. As the winch gears strained and groaned, the funnel-like mouth of the net gradually narrowed towards the tight-meshed cod end. After a brief struggle, Ernie released the trawl-end knot, and the catch was finally spewed onto the deck.
Not one word was uttered as they stared down at their haul. It neither squirmed nor skittered, nor sought silver-grey purchase in sucking mouths and flapping gills. It wasn't alive. And it wasn't cod.
"What the hell is this?" In the harsh spotlight, Gibson's florid face appeared almost comical in its slow confusion. "Ernie, take the fuckin' wheel." The skipper elbowed Lachlan aside as he hunkered down close to the deck, his eyes wary. "What the hell is this?"
Bert had plucked one from the deck, and was holding it at arm's length with an ugly grimace. "Maybes they're bullheads, Skipper. They sure look a wee bit like bullheads."
"Ye ever seen a bullhead or rockfish this fuckin' big, Bert?" Gibson replied, baring his teeth. "'Cause in twenty-five years at sea, I fuckin' haven't."
Lachlan could only bring himself to prod at one with his boot. He understood Bert's inference. Like the bullhead, they were blotched brown and red, with a large head and long-spined body. But there the similarity ended. Beyond a flat, moon-shaped carapace, there stretched a jointed body lined with pinched claws that terminated in a tapering tail with a long spike at its end. They were better than a foot long.
That queer sliding dread scratched at Lachlan's neck again, and he patted it down with slick gloves. In death, the creatures had curled inward like foetuses, each body plate crunched tight at one end and splayed wide at the other, like the jointed plastic snake he had terrorised his sister with for years. Their ribbed claws twitched in slow spasm. Between larger compound eyes, they displayed six smaller orbs arranged in opposing triangles. Lachlan could see his shadow in them.
When he caught sight of Bob picking up another, Lachlan kicked the one on the end of his boot away. It made a nasty, weighty sound as it slid back towards the opened trawl doors. "Don't touch their spines!"
Gibson shot him a well practiced look of scorn. "Ye tellin' me Lackey senior seen one ae these bastards afore, eh?"
Lachlan, mollified by the fact that both Bert and Bob had instantly dropped their own specimens back onto the deck at his shout, found that he was able to meet Gibson's furious gaze. "They look like sea scorpions to me, Skipper."
"Oh aye? Ye think ye're the only one wi' a wee bit knowledge ae marine biology, Lackey, eh?" Gibson kicked one of the larger creatures along the deck with another curse. It connected with the base of the trawl gantry with a sickening crack. "Sea fuckin' scorpions were around afore even fishes. They were over six foot long, Lackey." He slapped wet hair behind his ears as he strode towards starboard. "Christ knows, I've dredged up moor peat and mammoth teeth afore now; one officious little prick down the Maritime Museum bought some lumps ae crap off me five year ago, calling 'em Paleolithic huntin' artefacts, but I ken a big fuckin' ugly fish from an extinct arthropod, eejit." He thrust a finger back towards their dead haul. "And that ain't fuckin' prehistoric. That's non-viable fuckin' by-catch, laddie."
As much as five uncomfortable minutes passed in relative silence: the crew looking to one another or to their catch, while Gibson still stood inside the shelter deck staring out into the choppy sea. Lachlan realised that their winged scavengers had disappeared, leaving behind only the shouted roar of a Force 6—perhaps now closer to 7—and the slow rumble of The Relict's engine. Finally Gibson turned back to the stern.
"Bert, open the hatch and put the fuckers on ice. Maybes some other officious little prick'll pay good money to stick 'em on pins in a display case. And there's what looks like two score coley and haddock still in the cod end—get 'em on ice first. Might earn us a half pint each if we're lucky." He ambled back towards the wheelhouse with another muttered curse. "These fuckin' bottom-rollers and their rockhoppers ploughin' up the bed like butchers. We're the ones have the fishery quotas and grief, while those big bastards unearth fuck knows what, and take home five hundred grand hauls."
The rain began in earnest as Bob lifted clear the central hatch above the hold and clambered down its ladder.
"Think the skipper's a wee bit pissed at you," Bert grinned, his ill-humour recovered, even if his eyes still betrayed their unease.
Lachlan didn't answer. Pulling on rubber gloves, he tossed the dead bodies into the muted space below, his heart beating too slowly, his breath the colour of winter. He didn't look at Bert, and he didn't look at them. He lifted and tossed until his back screamed and his joints seized. Like the gulls before it, his sense of foreboding had vanished—to be replaced by a quickening fear as formless and dazzling as a sun's reflection against choppy sea.
The storm winds grew wilder throughout the day, confining the crew to quarters. They didn't cast the net again. Taking advantage of the unexpected reprieve, they took to their bunks well before sunset, and even Lachlan surrendered easily to sleep.
He was awoken from a nightmare of abyssal night into another just as dark, his arms flailing wildly where he had been floundering in long, endless gullets of rock and sulphurous cloud—chased deeper still by monsters. Monsters crouched in black never touched by sun.
"What the fuck?"
Bob's voice came to him as if from too great a distance, until Lachlan climbed higher out of sleep and heard the sound again. A low metallic thud towards the stern. And then another.
"Lachlan? What the shit is that?"
Lachlan jumped down from his cot on unsteady legs. "Could be a mako."
Bob got out of his own bunk, his generous belly all but obscuring Silver Surfer boxers. "A mako?"
Another thud sounded amidships, perhaps as little as ten feet aft. It reverberated along the hull, and Lachlan balked under an assault of sudden claustrophobia that momentarily had him longing for the freezing, rain-swept deck above.
Bob's eyes were frightened white spheres. "I've heard of one mako this far out, Lachlan, but not three."
When another thud hit hard against the hull directly ahead of him, Lachlan actually cringed away as if he expected the metal to buckle against it. In the following silence, his breath whistled through his teeth as he stepped tentatively closer, pressing his ear against the cold metal.
For one moment, all he could hear was the hum of the engine and the far off roar of the swell many feet above them. And then another thud sounded forward, close to the bow. His heart got going again after a few lost beats, and he managed to keep his ear close, steadying himself against the flat of his palms. He could hear something else under those thuds, something quieter and somehow worse. It reminded him of nails drawn slowly down a chalkboard. He thought of twitching claws and tapering tails that terminated in long spikes. They were trying to find a way in. Lachlan stumbled backward before crashing into the lower bunk.
Bob hauled him back onto his feet. "Not five—" His head swivelled wildly back towards the stern, his fingers nipping at Lachlan's arms. "Six! Jesus Christ. What is that?"
Lachlan shook his head once, twice. His heart jack-hammered against his ribcage. "I don't know."
The next morning dawned clear and calm. They ate a breakfast of salted porridge and thick coffee in silence. After the second mug, Gibson cleared his throat too loudly. "We've moved into Viking sector. There's another shadow out towards Silver Pit. In one hour we'll drop the net." He stood up and headed back towards the galley. "Get the gear ready."
A framed motto hung above the exit from the fore cabin, and Lachlan glanced up at it seconds before the North Sea wind tore every other thought from his head. Whatever's for ye won't go by ye. As if it had a choice, caught in the dragging maw of a two hundred foot wide trawler net.
Icy rain returned as they set the gear. The winch gears strained and groaned. Banter was loud and too obviously forced. Lachlan watched the cookies sink and the floats disappear, their luminous pink swiftly overwhelmed by black. The Relict's engine stalled and protested before taking up the slack. The net drum drew the warps tight. They began to trawl.
Around lunchtime, Lachlan found Gibson hunched over his haphazardly stationed monitors in the wheelhouse, an extinguished and soggy roll-up pinched tight between his lips.
"Skipper? You want a brew?"
Gibson turned eyes that were too startled towards him, and Lachlan looked away until he heard the skipper clear his throat. "Come here, laddie. Come and have a look at this."
Amid a bewildering plethora of electronics—gear controls and hydraulic monitoring consoles, trawl sensors and satellite navigation screens—Lachlan better recognised the black sonar grid and its sweeping circumference of green. Less than one hundred yards beyond their stern, it highlighted a vast hourglass shape in neon relief.
"Is that or is that no' a shoal ae fuckin' cod?"
Lachlan eyed the shadow with the dubiety of someone as familiar with cod as he was with the confidence of a trawler boat's skipper. "It could be."
Gibson's forehead ploughed new furrows. "Come on, boy, yer father was the best fisherman I ever kenned." He stabbed at the monitor with a finger that trembled. "Is that or is that no' a shoal ae fuckin' cod?"
The radio burst into static life, startling them both.
"This is the Met Office shipping forecast, issued on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 1300 on Friday 15 January. There are warnings of gales in Biscay, Sole, Rockall, Hebrides and Malin. Fisher, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne and Dogger: Southwest 4 or 5, backing south 5 or 6, veering west 6 to 7 later in Forth and Tyne. Forties, Viking, and North Utsire: storm warning. Easterly 7 to gale 9, occasionally severe gale 10, becoming cyclonic later. Rough or very rough. Rain, sleet, and poor visibility."
Lachlan swallowed down a wave of bile as his stomach rode another swell. He turned back to the exit in an effort to pretend that he hadn't seen the same weakness in the captain's eyes. "Whatever it is, Skipper, we've trawled it. It's already ours."
They began winching in the net mid afternoon, a half-hearted smurry of sleet and rain hampering their already slow progress. This time the hydraulics screamed in protest as the warps wound backwards over the net drum. When the drum suddenly stalled, the warps stuck fast just above the otter board line, white smoke rising from their grinding efforts.
"We're hung down!" Irvine bellowed, whilst exacerbating The Relict's screams by hauling back and forth upon the gears of the Gilson winches. Despite their previous catch and the growing storm, despite their very literal bumps in the night, every deckhand—Lachlan included—ran to the stern doors and began manually winding in the net and the first of its pink floats. The net was worth thousands. If it truly was snagged on the bottom, they stood to lose a lot more than just the price of another haul.
Gibson came up behind Lachlan, his curses loud and panicked. "Ernie, take the fuckin' wheel." He glanced up at the stern gantry. "Quit ridin' the gears, Irvine. Gi'e it some slack, then haul back fast on the hydraulics." He shoved hard against Lachlan, and breathed hot against his ear. "You some kind of Jonah, Lackey, eh? In twenty-five years at sea, I've never—"
"We're tippin' stern, Skipper!" Bert suddenly roared, stumbling away from the open trawl doors before grasping fast to a cookie along what little foot rope had made it back onboard.
"Shit!" Lachlan slid down the slick deck towards the ramp and its open trawl doors, missing the dark space between them only through a contrary lurch of the boat's hull. Sandwiched between Gibson and Bob, and now looking down upon the dark roiling sea just below the stern, Lachlan found himself remembering the final moments of Rose and Jack aboard the Titanic. His self-conscious chuckle sounded too much like a scream.
"Skipper, we need to lose the gear!" Irvine shouted from far away.
Sleet battered icy bullets against Lachlan's face, blurring his vision as The Relict rode high on a swell before plummeting too deep and too wet. Salt water momentarily washed out his gaping mouth, and then they were riding high again. The winches screamed—and the stern dropped like a stone. Towards dark, and the abyss of Lachlan's nightmares. Towards the vast hourglass shape caught inside their net. Bert gave an inhuman scream as he suddenly spun out into dark, white-speckled space, arms flailing.
"Cut us loose, Irvine!" Gibson screamed in Lachlan's ear. "Cut us loose!"
They managed to salvage the otter boards and the main drag of the towing warps. Aside from Bert MacKenzie, they had lost the net and its potential haul, bridle, foot rope and ground line. The Relict's engine sputtered as feebly as its hydraulics. Grey smoke filtered up from the engine room. As the predicted Force 10 raged around their bow, The Relict's crew lolled exhausted inside its fore cabin.
"It was a fuckin' rock."
Lachlan glanced at the skipper's face. It was ashen and slack. The wet lips that clamped down on his roll-up trembled.
While Irvine rode the swell above them and Ernie saw to the struggling engine, Bob, Gibson and Lackey pushed uneaten stovies around their plates in the galley. The wind howled, and the engine struggled. Crockery and pans rattled hard inside their locked confines.
"When will the tow reach us?"
Gibson turned blazing eyes upon Bob, who shrunk backwards in his seat as if the skipper had struck him.
"What the fuck are ye askin' me for? Can ye hear that out there, eh? It's called a fuckin' storm, Bob. There's sixty knot winds, sleet, and zero fuckin' visibility. I ken that the Port Authority boys are fuckin' saints an' all that, but even they wouldnae be stupid enough to leave Peterheid now."
Lachlan pushed up from the booth with a curse. He tossed his plate into the metal sink, where it shattered too loudly. A strange warmth tingled down his arms and legs, not unlike the first shot of rum after a long trip. Stalking towards his quarters, he threw Gibson the very best scowl that he could muster. "It wasn't a fuckin' rock, and you know it. And it wasn't cod."
That night there were no more thuds against the hull, no more drawn-out scratches. Lachlan stared impotently up into darkness, imagining the rust bubbles and rivets less than two feet above his head—and then the howling, rain-slick deck beyond. He slept for maybe a little over an hour, keeping one palm always flat against the cold hull. He knew that they were still out there. Waiting to find another way in.
They went back on deck a little after six a.m. The rising sun cast orange fingers over a now settled sea, while the working boards sparkled white over patchy brown. Flurries of snow caught upon Lachlan's eyelashes as he stood behind Irvine's rigid shoulder, and he blinked them away. The wind tickled hair against his temples. His nose ran while his fingers stung and pulsed. He had forgotten his gloves. He noticed none of it.
As far as the eye could see, there floated bodies. Huge collections of herring and whiting mixed with bottom-feeders like eel and halibut, flounder and roughy. Invertebrates—shellfish, crabs and pink-frilled anemones—filled the spaces between them like iced flowers on a cake. There were thousands of them, from every zone of the sea. From sunlight, through twilight, and down to dark. A grey-brown carpet that stretched beyond even the widening horizon, rocked by the swell and buffeted by the growing breeze.
"Jesus."
Lachlan didn't know who said it, but he agreed. There was nothing else to say. When Gibson slammed shut the wheelhouse door, every one of them jumped.
"Christ, what the fuck is this now?"
Lachlan was no longer fooled by the skipper's indignant fury. Gibson was terrified, and dangerously so—the kind of terrified that got people killed, where otherwise they might have lived to tell a bad tale. Lachlan had been happy to put his fate in Gibson's hands while they had been fighting sea swells and trawling the bottom, but this was different. Gibson was old school and too stuck in his own beliefs to ever want to see past them.
"We need to get out of here, Gibson. The storm's broken."
Gibson's mouth set into a thin, tight line. He didn't look towards the sea again. "We need a tow. Do ye have any idea how much fuckin' fuel we've already—"
Irvine's lips suddenly curled over his few teeth in an ugly grimace of their own. "We have lost a man, Gibson! And ye want tae quibble over fuel?" He reached a trembling arm starboard. "There are things down there! Ye ken that just as well as any ae us. Big fuckin' things, Gibson." The first-mate's voice cracked and dropped to a whisper. "And all ae this . . . this slaughter . . . it's for us. Ye ken that too."
"They've been following us since we caught those sea scorpions."
Gibson found a better target in Lachlan, and rounded on him, eyes blazing. The sweat was running off his nose and chin in thin rivers. "They're no' sea fuckin' scorpions, alright? Do ye lot hear yerselves? Ye ken what ye're sayin' don't ye? That out there is what—yon ugly, dead bastards' mummys and daddys, eh?" Now breathing so hard that the veins in his neck stood out in purple cords, Gibson spun on his heel and made for the wheelhouse. "There's another Force 10 comin' up from Forties and Cromarty. We stay put and we wait for our tow." He wrenched open the wheelhouse door with a shaky curse, and tried to throw them one last glare of contempt. "Have a fuckin' word wi' yerselves."
When Ernie suddenly banged open the central hatch, Lachlan let escape a guttural cry and stumbled backwards into Irvine. Ernie's grin was hollow and far from apologetic. Black shadows pulled in around his eyes. Balanced on the narrow ladder, he hauled the first icebox over his shoulder and threw it onto the deck, where it slid fast over a bank of ice and came to rest close to the now redundant gantry. Another swiftly followed it.
"They want 'em, they can fuckin' have 'em."
None of them looked at the lifeless bodies floating on the sea, any more than they did the dead creatures in their hands as they threw them back. When the last of them were gone, icy wet air whistled through Lachlan's lungs and stung his throat. Until then, he hadn't even realised that he had been holding his breath.
Bob screamed high and wild when a thud sounded directly under the stern doors. Irvine grasped hold of Lachlan for balance when another came, and then another—shaking the boards under their feet, reverberating rings of assaulted metal and rivet. The fourth was a concentrated effort—and far more effective. Lachlan skidded on a patch of frozen snow as something rammed hard against the keel below the stern doors, rocking the boat enough to lay Irvine out flat and wrench a second scream from Bob.
An icebox slid along the deck, slamming into Lachlan's ankle as The Relict righted itself in a low roll. Coley 15# had been scrawled on its polystyrene lid. When he looked back towards the open hatch, Ernie grinned again, another two boxes balanced high on his shoulders. Small, unhealthy spots of colour had appeared at his cheekbones. "Gi'e 'em all ae it. All ae it!"
The next blow dislodged a sheet of ice close to a stack of cookies. Lachlan watched the ice slip and slide, battering itself against the round, steel balls until there was nothing of it left, save wet timber smears and powder. He closed his eyes. Another much closer banging stalled Lachlan's heart again, until he realised that Irvine had begun throwing his fists against the wheelhouse door.
"The bastard's locked himself in! Gibson! Open this door!"
Lachlan hoisted up the first box of coley, struggled back to starboard, and began hurling the fish into the sea. Their slick, cold skin slipped through his fingers and he swallowed bile. This time he looked down.
All around The Relict there had opened up a space of dark water perhaps as much as ten feet wide. Apart from the dead coley, not one of the floating bodies came close to penetrating this space, and when Lachlan tried to see down beyond the black and the boat's slick reflection, he saw only himself: a small, round head peering out of its besieged castle. But they were down there. He didn't need to see them to know that; didn't need to feel them as they rammed harder and faster under his feet. They were down there alright. And a few handfuls of dead fish weren't about to make them go away.
And then came a sound like a traffic collision—a terrific roar followed by shattered, grinding metal and debris. Screams. Lachlan's stomach lurched up and away as his world became suddenly inverted. Vertigo held back his own screams as he fell down, down towards that corridor of black. He hit the water too hard and too fast. Pain shot up through his calves and thighs. His groin and pelvis prickled as if hot, and he drew in lungfuls of saltwater as he sank like a stone. Recovering from its near capsize, The Relict rolled too low, casting Lachlan further into shadow and wrenching a scream from his sea-clogged throat.
Cold dark silence filled his head. The abyss of his nightmares felt very near. When he imagined that he felt something bump against his thigh, he recoiled backward in an agitated mass of bubbles and flailing limbs, his fist colliding with The Relict's rough hull in a muted thump.
They were here. Sinking lower into cold shadow, Lachlan's heartbeat quickened inside his ears. The air that escaped the corners of his mouth tickled his cheeks and hairline. The sun was an ephemeral suggestion of gold too far above him.
He recoiled again when something glanced off his shoulder, and then he grasped fast to the rope and pulled. It tugged briefly back in reply and returned to slack. Cold crept inside his skin like thousands of fine needles, while his lungs burned as if on fire. He couldn't haul himself up; he likely couldn't even hang on while others did the pulling for him. But still he couldn't let go.
They came out of the darkness like a rushing mob: flashing white limbs and scales, snapping claws and spines—the smallest of them still easily the size of an adult crocodile. They circled around him, jostling for space, pushing against one another with long-reaching webbed paddles. Under water, those disjointed segments of armour plating appeared almost graceful, winding and unwinding with fluid ease, flicking spiked tails towards him. Taunting him. Their venomous spines quivered and lengthened. Those clustered, unblinking eyes fixed fast to his own.
Lachlan had no more horror left in him. His lungs screamed as they moved in closer, blocking out the light that filtered from above with almost exquisite indolence. They touched his flaccid skin, puncturing his flesh.
Despite his pain, his terror, Lachlan fought to hold onto consciousness. Even as his sight crept darker at its edges like burning paper, his eyes never left the flat, ringed carapaces; the writhing, tapering tails; the ridged claws that opened and closed, opened and closed. The round, crowded spheres of liquid black. These ancient resurrections had been no more interested in their dead juveniles than they had been in the coley. They were not the bottom-feeders, the scourge of the sea floor. But they were perhaps its new champions.
As the last of the light disappeared, plunging Lachlan into darkness, and biting, searing, tearing agony, he clung to the rope even after all coherence had left him. Dangled like the bait that he had always been.