Catch of the Day
By Roger Wyse
She was dressed that evening, not in an evening dress, but nonetheless in the colors of her melancholy mood. It was not a sweet melancholy, but a malevolent melancholy mood brought on by the certainty that she could never again be a queen and there would never again be another colony, at least not one of her own. The old troops had deserted her, what was left of them anyway, and her most recent hatching had been a complete failure—providing hardly enough eggs for the scavenging fish to feed. Discouraged but not defeated, she lay on a bed of seagrass, waiting for something—someone, anything—to cheer her up, to lift her spirits, to create a sea change from her complete state of emotional disarray. Oh yes! She was feeling melancholy, and there was only one thing to do about it.
She lay in waiting silently, not moving, save the small movement created by the gentle currents coursing through her gills. As if a wave of seagrass had engulfed her, she too, turned green, blending in perfectly with her surroundings. To complete the deception, tender green shoots sprouted from the surface of her skin, granulations like the first blades of grass on a mountainside in spring, and her head flattened like a giant dome in a dormant crater. The trap was set. Now she would wait for the unsuspecting prey.
***
Aboard the small research vessel from which he had toiled in relative obscurity for an ungrateful photographic editor of an ungrateful National Oceanographic magazine, Winslow Hargrove motioned to his nephew to hand him the camera and floodlight—and to make it snappy. After all, he didn't have all day. He had important work to do. He was about to embark on a great adventure, a search for a giant sea monster, probably a cephalopod, which was rumored to have caused the demise of several Asians. He could care less about the Asians, who were supposed to have been connected to an organized crime syndicate from Tokyo. He was only interested in taking pictures of the beast, pictures that would no doubt make him famous and ensure that he would get more interesting assignments from now on.
According to the rumors, the men had been devoured by the giant sea monster in the vicinity of some uninhabited land masses off the coast of Maine. There were only so many small, uninhabited islands on the Eastern seaboard, and he and his nephew would search each and every one of them from Maine to Virginia, if necessary.
A large, towering man, with a disposition several shades ornerier than a raccoon on an empty stomach, Hargrove spat and said, "You're slower than a North American glacier, boy, you know that?" His nephew, a kind, gentle boy of fifteen, stepped back and replied, "Sorry, Uncle."
Hargrove looked at his nephew with disdain. He had no time for kindness, and gentility was not his cup of tea. He had more important things on his mind, frustrations with his editor, anger at the world in general, and a fear of the monster lurking in the depths of the sea. Without a word, he climbed over the side of the boat and stepped down the ladder into the water. Below the surface, frustrations dissolved slowly, foot by foot, bubble by bubble; anger channeled into determination; fear was submerged by a calm brought about by the realization that such a discovery would be worth a fortune.
He swam for a bit, wandering and wondering, poking and prodding at this crevice and that, all the while deciding his plan of attack. The weapon: an underwater floodlight with a flash device. The target: the unsuspecting cephalopod. The strategy: point and click, each time bombarding the subject with intense rays of light. With each flash, she might react, startle, jettison, blow up into a giant bell shape, or perform some other unusual act. It would all be captured on film for the world to see. A world that would pay handsomely. Much more than it would pay for simply killing the thing.
***
She had laid in waiting for a long time, and nothing, no one, had gone by, not even a solitary hermit crab. She was just about to leave when she saw something, someone, in the distance moving slowly toward her.
She had spotted him long before he was even aware of her. Even so, she waited patiently, making sure that there were no others, watching before making her move. The diver stopped suddenly and looked at the seagrass. Moments later, he was holding up an odd-looking object. It was not a spear gun; she had seen those before. It was something smaller, wider, and bulkier, and for a moment, her curiosity distracted her. The object flashed at her, and she blinked. It flashed again, and she blinked again. As it flashed a third time, she blinked once more and saw spots before her eyes. The diver had done that one too many times, and what had started out as a curiosity had turned into a source of great irritation.
She rose suddenly, turning from a sleepy green mountain- side into some great underwater volcano, red hot, with new formations of glowing red granulations, a new island of flesh and blood rising with fury from the sea floor. In moments, the red-hot flash turned to a malevolent dark red, and a large arm shot out of the grass and quickly wrapped around his legs. Another wrapped around his waist and another around his neck, each tentacle touching his hair, adhering to the skin, and suctioning the blood from his body. Then she slowly pulled him in for a closer look, the suction cups on her free arm fingering his flesh as if he were an oddity from an underwater freak show.
He was thrashing helplessly, but she was able to hold him steady. She wanted to hold him, to feel him, and then to squeeze tighter and tighter, as if by doing so she would strike fear in the hearts of men, all men. As she drew him in, she was repulsed by his ugliness. The black rubbery skin—no colors, just dullness. The see-through shell, beneath which were the small, beady eyes. The curved protuberance running from his mouth to the two ugly stumps on his back. Clearly, man did not belong here. He belonged on the land above water. Under water, he was a freak of nature, an affront to all the organisms of the sea, who were so thoroughly adapted to their environment. There was only one solution, really, separation for all men—or at the very least, extermination for the trespasser.
He was a few feet away, but she could not see the fear in his eyes. She drew him in closer, eye to eye, so that she could see the fear, feel the fear, taste the fear. Ah, yes, it was there. Frantic. Wide-eyed. Bubbling. It calmed her, relaxed her, and made her feel at peace with the world.
The small cells on her skin enlarged, and the quantum quasi- musculature relaxed simultaneously, changing colors chromatically from a fierce, dark red to a light, brilliant array of pink—announcing silently the joy and ecstasy she was feeling as she slowly tightened an arm around the neck of the unwitting diver who had dared to blind her.
He scratched at one arm, and bit into another, but she did not flinch. Instead, she watched with satisfaction as his eyes screamed out in terror just before the see-through shell filled with a beautiful, bright red ink, the kind of which she had never seen before. She looked again and realized that it was not ink but something much more vital. In a moment, it was all over and she was well satisfied. After all, she had a deep and abiding hatred for man, who had killed many of her hatchlings over the years. Had no use for them, except in the pure pleasure derived from killing them. She took one look at her victim, unfeeling. She managed the cephalopod equivalent of a smile, released him, and went on her way to pay a visit to her sister whom she had not seen in a long time.
She had tuned in on the frequency of her sister's infra-signals, which were getting clearer. Soon, perhaps a few more days, and she would be there. As she gathered in the sea floor ahead of her in a chaotic but coordinated movement of ever-stretching and ever-twisting arms, she wondered if her sister had a successful hatching, and if so, if she could in her own way share her sister's happiness and good fortune.
