"The Beast of Trash Island" is a horror/suspense novella by Steve Metcalf. Said the author, "I had written some dark screenplays but this was my first foray into prose where there were people I needed to kill. Sarah, unfortunately, drew the short straw and was the first of many to meet their grisly end. Plus, I really love the horrifying cliffhanger of this chapter!"
Chapter Four, Sphere
ON THIS VOYAGE, like any voyage requiring round-the-clock operation, Captain Scott and his first mate Benjamin Andrews worked opposite shifts. The captain piloted the ship during the daytime and Ben piloted the ship overnight. Since they had arrived at their destination—Trash Island—they could ease their twenty-four-hour schedule and compare notes for longer than a passing moment.
They sat in their shared quarters, sipping brandy, chatting about the last two days.
“So they brought it onboard?” Mr. Andrews asked, draining the rest of his glass and pouring another two fingers.
Captain Scott nodded.
“Picked it up right out of the trash and paddled it back to my beautiful boat.” He puffed on his pipe and looked out the portal retrospectively.
“A black sphere,” Mr. Andrews said. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Still gazing out the window, the captain shook his head.
“Nope,” he finally remarked. “Thirty years at sea, never saw anything like that.” He paused for a moment. “But that’s not too much of a surprise. People don’t realize, really, how big the oceans are. They see the maps, the globes, and they hear that the Earth’s surface is seventy percent water...and it never hits home. However, you ask a sailor to name the five strangest things he’s seen at sea and it’s almost impossible to narrow the list. And, very rarely, will two sailors have the same phenomena listed.”
“Right,” Mr. Andrews said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “About 20 years ago, I remember being on leave in Porto Farina. Just for a weekend as the ship was being fit with new kitchen equipment. Anyway, I was sitting on the pier watching the sunset and I looked up and saw an entire city floating in the clouds. Half a dozen buildings of different heights and shapes. As I was watching, 10 or 12 people joined me on the pier talking, pointing, snapping pictures.”
Captain Scott was smiling as if he had heard similar stories.
“Fata Morgana,” he said.
Mr. Andrews smiled and nodded.
“Fata Morgana. Suddenly, the wind shifted and the clouds changed direction. The city was gone. We all looked at each other to confirm the shared hallucination. It was only later that I learned of the Fata Morgana—the sky mirage. It was so detailed I was convinced that I was looking through a portal into another dimension. A floating city.”
Mr. Andrews leaned back in his seat, put his feet up on the footstool.
“I doubt that the sphere is anything so fantastic,” the captain said. “It could be something as simple as a ball bearing from some huge machinery. Painted black. Or maybe it’s made of rubber and has absorbed some oil. Who knows? We’ll let the eggheads examine it while we’re safely on the bridge collecting a paycheck.”
The two men raised their glasses in a toast.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Mr. Andrews said. “Now, where’s that caviar?”
* *
Fifty fathoms below the surface—roughly the height of a 30 story building—he awoke.
* *
It was nearly midnight and the crowd had almost completely dispersed. There were different pockets of parties going on around the yacht. Some drinking games over here. A poker game over there. A random person or two would make their way up close to the sphere and snap a handful of pictures—some of them selfies with their faces in the foreground and the mysterious black orb in the background.
James and Ai decided to review their data and come up with the best plan of attack for tomorrow’s mapping of the perimeter of the trash island.
Edmund had taken Sarah to his stateroom to get to know her on a deeper level.
Micah, for his part, was meditating.
For all of his rich, playboy, Ryan Reynolds-esque antics, Micah was both smart and centered. He often found a quiet place each night to reflect on the day’s events and mentally resolve whatever stress he was feeling at the moment.
Right now he sat cross-legged on a bench at the extreme rear of the Aqua Tom, palms resting on his knees. It was a very plush chair against the aft of the party deck. His eyes were closed as he breathed in the clean, cool ocean air. His face was illuminated by a mixture of the boat’s interior lights, and the moon and stars high above.
But, then, something interrupted his quiet reverie.
He was used to blocking out the sounds of those around him. The sounds of partying, drinking, laughing and vomiting all blended into what amounted to a channel on an expensive white noise machine—a setting called “The College Experience.” But this was different.
She was crying.
In the quiet moments between the sounds of nature and waves lapping at the hull, Micah could make out gentle sobs in the relatively short distance. After a couple minutes of this, he opened his eyes and peered around the general vicinity to locate the source of the strangely out-of-place sound.
She stood in the far corner, her back to him. She held her face in her hands, her shoulders undulating in time with her nearly-silent sobs. Having identified her, Micah stood up and walked across the deck to see what was wrong.
“Hey,” he said when he was within earshot. “What’s wrong?”
She wiped her hands across her face and sniffed back any tears that might have been on the verge. After a quiet moment, she finally turned to face him.
“We’re all going to die,” she said.
She was an international student from the Ukraine of average height and build, and an upper classman in the same course of study as Edmund. She was wearing shorts and a dark top that contrasted nicely with her alabaster skin.
Her name was Katya, and her eyes were wide with fear.
“What are you talking about?” Micah asked. “You’re Katya, right? We were in Bongar’s Psychology of Danger together. Are you seasick or something?”
She shook her head, her long, blonde ponytail catching the breeze just so. Her eyes were red and puffy; she had been crying for quite some time.
Katya leaned slightly to her right and peered over Micah’s left shoulder. It took a moment for him to realize what she was looking at.
“The sphere?” he said. “Shit, girl, I thought you were afraid of sharks or something.”
She shook her head.
“There’s something wrong with it,” she said, almost whispering. “It doesn’t want to be here.”
Micah turned to look back at the sphere. It was still sitting anchored to the deck of the Aqua Tom. Two Stanford football players—a running back and an edge rusher—walked past, slowed, and took a couple pictures with their phones. He turned back to Katya.
“I admit that it’s a little strange,” Micah said. “But it hasn’t exhibited any sort of threatening behavior.” He leaned his back against the opposite corner of the deck rail from Katya. They faced each other at a right angle. “We grabbed it because it showed up weird on one of our cameras. It’s about as harmful as a beach ball. What’s got you so spooked?”
She brushed some stray hairs out of her face, and tugged at one that had caught in her lip gloss.
“Look. I had a sort of, um.” She paused while searching for the word. “Premonition. In the back of my head. I felt some bad things coming. It’s like the bol’shoy ubiytsa. The big killer. But also the little killer.” She paused again and wiped her eyes. She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it, Micah. We’re out here in the middle of the ocean and I had this crazy sense of dread. I should have never come.” She sniffed again.
Micah opened and closed his mouth a couple times as if his brain was writing comebacks, deleting them, and writing new ones.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I admit that it’s weird, but it’s not harmful. It’s probably a chunk of obsidian, like that girl said, that got polished smooth by sand and sediment in the ocean currents. Nothing evil. Nothing insidious.”
“Volcanic glass doesn’t float.”
“It would if it was hollow, and filled with air,” Micah said.
Katya said something under her breath.
“What was that?”
She turned to look at him and said with a smirk: “Так же, как голову. Just like your head.”
Micah smiled, completely deflecting the insult.
“So, you don’t want to come back to my room?”
* *
While the Aqua Tom was a huge yacht, shuttling 20 passengers halfway across the Pacific Ocean with a round-the-clock crew certainly put some strain on her creature comforts. For example, some people had to double-up sleeping quarters to ensure rooms for the crew, storage for the extra provisions and the large data center currently occupied by James and Ai.
While the third member of the research triumvirate was busy trying to make headway with a beautiful Russian student, the two environmental science majors were crunching numbers.
They were starting to shape the data that had been so far collected and plan out the next several days’ worth of research.
“I’m going to approach this from a plastics perspective,” Ai said, not looking up from her computer monitor. “Taking samples of the micro plastics and doing a degradation study.”
James nodded. He, too, was studying data. He had a stack of print-outs and was comparing them to some printed satellite images.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going to collect as much data as possible while we’re here and analyze it all on campus. Use those big computer labs, you know?”
Ai smiled. She knew James well enough to understand his methods. While a true research scientist would spend time developing a hypothesis and then gathering data to prove or disprove the statement, James was more comfortable collecting a world of data, publishing it, and letting the people decide what it meant.
“So your null hypothesis is that there is no island of plastic swirling in the Pacific Ocean,” Ai said, grinning thinly.
“Hah hah,” James replied, still reading through lines and lines of data.
There was a faint beep on the sonar. Both of them looked over to the corner of the room to figure out what had triggered the passive alarm system.
* *
It was the largest single room on the yacht—the King Stateroom—and Edmund Shaw was sprawled out on the bed, grinning broadly, his hands laced behind his head. Sarah had found a light jazz music channel on the Spotify app on her phone and was plugging it into the room’s speaker system. Finding the right volume, she started to do a slow strip-tease as she walked from the entertainment center to the bed.
“Alright, alright, alright,” Edmund said, smiling. He was already stripped down to his underwear and socks. Slowly, he brought his hands down and hooked his thumbs into the elastic band of his lucky Captain America boxer shorts.
To the pulsating beat and the warbling, muted trumpet, Sarah turned and faced Edmund. She pulled her arms through the sleeves of her sundress and let it fall, puddling around her bare feet. Her white bra and thong cut a deep contrast against the color of her skin.
She took a sultry step closer to the bed and Edmund, lacking any seductiveness, yanked his underwear down and kicked the boxers across the room.
Sarah laughed in spite of herself and unhooked her bra.
“Lord ha’ mercy,” Edmund said, turning to one side and leaning up on his right elbow.
* *
James pushed off from his desk and rolled the chair all the way across the room. For her part, Ai simply stood and walked to the beeping system. It was a proximity sensor.
James tapped a few keys and turned to Ai.
“It’s gibberish,” he said, pointing to a section of the screen. The whole thing looked like overlapping color splotches. The image, while chaotic, meant something to the researchers. “This readout is meaningless.”
“Hmm,” she said, leaning in. “Must be a glitch. This thing was set to such high parameters that it might as well be turned off. It’s reading something too big. Must be an error. Can you reset it from here?”
James turned the monitor to its side. The unit’s commands were folded into a small packet attached to the right side of the CRT.
“Yep,” he said. “Got it.”
He hit a four-key command on the keyboard and the motion sensor clicked off. With a computer chime, the screen flickered back to life with the manufacturer’s logo.
“We’ll be reading live data in 15 seconds.”
Ai glanced out the window of the Aqua Tom. She could see the moon illuminating the city-sized island of trash.
* *
Shrouded in moonlight and the one desk lamp that had been left on in the room, Sarah stood with her hands on her hips, smiling at Edmund. He was patting the unoccupied side of the bed. Clad in only her white thong, Sarah looped her thumbs into the sides of her underwear and started to pull them down.
Neither them saw the twin black tentacles that slid silently in through the cabin window.
* *
“Did you see that?” Katya asked.
Despite the seductive invitation to visit Micah’s bedroom, Katya remained uneasy. She allowed herself to be led up to the Aqua Tom’s flying bridge. Lured by the promise of a midnight cocktail and snacks from his private stash, the two sat in comfortable chairs discussing their separate but intertwined worlds.
Micah sat forward and dunked another Oreo cookie in an ice-cold glass of milk.
Katya pointed off the port side of the ship—the side that was facing Trash Island.
“It was, like, a ripple that went through the micro plastic.”
“I don’t see anything,” Micah said, peering into the moonlit ocean. Even though he put on a brave face for Katya, he was more than a little unnerved by the sphere. Plus, the idea of a giant, floating trash ball made up of a billion pieces of discarded plastic put everyone on edge. Not that it was malevolent...it was just weird.
They all knew that they were looking for the North Pacific garbage vortex—some of the passengers were a little more invested than others—but actually finding it had proven a little unnerving. Nobody could figure out if the miles and miles of trash would look more or less weird in the bright morning sunlight.
“Do you see it still?” he asked.
Katya shook her head, never taking her eyes off the floating plastic.
“No,” she said. “Not right now. Weird.” She sat back uneasily, maintaining a rigid posture. “This was a mistake,” she said, rubbing her eyes with the tips of her fingers.
* *
“Okay,” James said. “Live imaging is back now.”
They both leaned in toward the screen to see if the numbers had cleaned up any over the last readout.
“That can’t be right,” Ai said. She pointed at a section of the data and then looked at the amorphous blob that made up one third of the monitor. “That’s huge.”
* *
“Ow,” Sarah said.
Completely nude and ready to take the final three steps to Edmund’s bed, she had felt a pin-prick stab into the middle of her back. Just below where her bra had clasped shut until two minutes ago.
She, at the same time, reached back and tried to turn her head to look over her shoulder. Suddenly, silently, a thick black tentacle wrapped around the lower half of Sarah’s face and pulled backward. A second tentacle stabbed fully into the middle of her back. Her hands flailed out in front of her and she kicked her legs involuntarily. She was held firmly in place, however, and the second tentacle—like some sort of organic machine press—slowly, agonizingly pushed through her body and emerged from the front of her ribcage, dripping with blood and shredded internal organs.
Edmund sat up and screamed in horror. He was frozen in place, though, as he watched the grotesque scene unfold.
His mind was shutting down—the mental equivalent of going into physical shock from a serious injury. It was almost impossible to perceive what was happening six feet away. Sarah’s screams were muffled by the thick black tentacle that relentlessly pulled her torso backward. Conversely, Edmund’s screams had reached a higher pitch than he would have thought possible. One thought kept reverberating through his mind—what what what what what what what—until it was an overlapping echo of thought that prevented him from thinking or doing anything at all.
It was as if his mind had short-circuited.
As the tentacles kept working in concert—one holding her head and the other continuing to force its way through her body—Sarah began shuddering. Her eyes rolled up into her head and her limbs now hung limp. Edmund, now hoarse from the continuous screams that had drained his lungs of power, was on his knees at the edge of the bed, eyes bulging, veins standing out on his neck.
The tentacle kept working its way through Sarah’s torso, growing in girth as it went. Suddenly, her body was simply torn in two. For a horrifying moment, her torso was held in place by the tentacle wrapped around her head. The floor was covered in intestines that seemed to take forever to unspool from her body cavity.
Edmund started to faint as the two tentacles now rocketed toward him.
The entire event had taken ten seconds.
* *
“Did you hear something?” Micah asked, cocking his head to the side to try to get a better sense of the world around him.
Katya went silent for a moment. She was still on edge about the ripple of movement she had seen under Trash Island. The wind was still, the ship rocked back and forth in the waves.
Finally, she shook her head.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she said. “You want to take a walk around the boat? See if we can find anything?”
* *
“Are you sure?” James said. “It looks like it’s right under us.”
Ai, eyes wide, simply stared at the screen.
“Oh, no,” she said.
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