The storm lessened a bit the next afternoon. Wilson unbolted the deck hatch and went up into the navigational octagon. From this vantage the onslaught of weather was thrilling and terrifying. It seemed to him another world boiled out there in ferment, a landscape unseen since the beginning of time, when—so the story goes—God raised the seas in their fury upon the lifeless rock of the earth.
Captain Amundsen and Cricket were perched over charts and instruments beneath the bubble, like turret gunners in a Flying Fortress. Waves pounded across the Plexiglas, reducing the illumination in the octagon to a dull, watery twilight.
“State your business, mister,” the captain said as Wilson rebolted the hatch.
“Permission to remain topside, sir,” Wilson said. “Going a little stir-crazy down there.”
The captain nodded. “Take a look at this.”
Wilson stepped over to the opalescent radar screen. The storm appeared as a writhing, ugly green stain the size of a continent, superimposed on the Atlantic’s familiar contours.
“According to our satellite fix, we’ve been knocked off course by about four hundred nautical miles,” the captain said, squinting down at the screen. “We’re at two and a half degrees east of the twenty-second parallel, thirty-two degrees south of Greenwich. Making south-southeast for the Mauritanian coast of Africa at an approximate speed of seventeen knots.”
“How much time to get back to where we’re supposed to be?”
The captain squinted out at the murky turmoil beyond the bubble. “Never can tell. A few days, a week, two. The sea’s a mighty queer place. Anything can happen. I’ve seen tidal waves swallow whole cities and black skies at noon and volcanoes rising out of the dark water all bubbling and spitting up chunks of hot earth like blood, and I’ve seen worse yet.” The captain paused as a quick riff of static came over the shortwave. Wilson could almost make out the rise and fall of human speech before it faded out altogether.
“Once did two years as skipper of an English oceanographic vessel; this is twenty-odd years ago,” the captain continued, and a distant haunted look came to his eye. “She was the HMS Ozymandias, an old Royal Navy cutter refurbished for scientific work that some joker had renamed the Sandra Dee, after that blond girl who was in all those American beach movies.”
“Sandra Dee played Gidget,” Wilson interrupted, “the original Gidget before the TV show,” but at a sharp glance from Cricket, he felt foolish and shut up.
“The Brits outfitted the ship with all the latest technology.” The captain flicked a hard fingernail against the sonar screen. “Computers, sonar, radar, and a robot sub built by British Leyland and equipped with video cameras and attached by a two-mile-long umbilical cord. We were doing research on squids. Damned elusive creatures, the giant ones, I mean. But there’s been stories about them for centuries—how they can rise from the ocean floor and seize ships in their huge tentacles, how they’ve been known to do battle with whales. All apocryphal, of course, and ridiculed by marine biologists until some fisherman off the Douglas Reef in the South Pacific pulled up a sizable hunk of squid cartilage in the nets that fixed the whole creature at four hundred and sixty feet long. So everyone got excited, and we sailed out of Bristol in January to take a look down south.
“It was pretty rough going for a while, bad weather and engine trouble, and we ended up spending a month or so in the anchorage at Rorotan till the weather cleared. Then we were out after them. For a while we found nothing remarkable, no squids bigger than the kind they fry up with garlic in Italian restaurants. But one night, I was on watch around midnight and the sonar went crazy, a whole pattern of blips about two fathoms off our port bow. I woke up one of the marine biologists, a Frenchwoman named Adrienne something, and we unleashed the robot, and it went down with its spotlights and video cameras into the blackness. After a few minutes it started sending back pictures. We couldn’t believe what we saw: a squid the size of a tractor trailer, its one monster eye about as big around as the aboveground swimming pools you see in humbler suburban neighborhoods in the States.
“The French biologist went white and started to shake. It wasn’t the squid so much as what the squid had its tentacles around, a massive unknown thing like a gigantic worm, thrashing in the black water, its long, tubular body disappearing into the depths of the sea. This looked to be some kind of fight—squids are like cats, you know, very territorial—but the squid, huge as it was, didn’t have a chance. The other creature was the largest living thing I have ever seen, and I have seen blue whales in the waters off Newfoundland long as two football fields.
“We watched astonished, afraid to breathe. The bit of the creature’s flank we could make out was covered with a thick mess of barnacles and plant life, as if it had been resting somewhere on the bottom for centuries. Then the squid let out a massive cloud of black ink, and when the cloud cleared, there was nothing. Just empty water. We could only assume that the unknown thing, giant squid stuck to its back, had sunk forever into the depths.”
“Wow,” Wilson said, impressed. “What was it?”
The captain took a cigar out of his pocket and put it between his teeth unlit. “The Kraken,” he said quietly.
“The what?” Wilson said.
“The primeval worm that lives at the bottom of the sea. When it finally rises to the surface, they say the world will come to an end. And God knows, we’ve seen enough signs of that lately.”
“You’re kidding,” Wilson said.
At that moment Cricket turned from the navigational computer with a sarcastic grin on her face. “Of course he’s kidding,” she said. “It’s a fish story, the best damn fish story I’ve ever heard.”
Wilson looked from Cricket to the captain, not sure what to believe.
“One thing you need to learn about sailors, Wilson,” Cricket said, “is they always tell tall tales. Makes the time pass.”
“Captain?” Wilson said.
The captain scratched his shaggy beard and shrugged. “You don’t have to believe me,” he said, “either of you. But I’m here to tell you now there are more things in the sea and on it than you’ve ever thought possible. Just look around …”
He gestured vaguely toward the ocean’s bleak expanse, the horizon black with storm, the waves tall as three-story buildings—then he fixed Wilson with a look of unknown significance.