Fathomless

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  RETURN OF THE MONSTER

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHORS NOTES:

  “… combines the terror of Benchley’s JAWS with the primordial horror of Alten’s MEG in an adventure that is the best of both.”

  —Matthew Summers, Smash Dragons Book Reviews.

  FATHOMLESS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  Thank you to my test pilots – Matthew Summers, genre expert, and ex-Coastie, Paul Scott – good insights, gentlemen. And also a big shout-out to my editor, Amanda ‘AJ’ Spedding – my wizard who turns lead into gold!

  DEDICATION:

  To the men and women of the Coast Guard – alert, responsive, adaptive, and always there – thank you. Semper Paratus.

  “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant,

  and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

  —Isoroku Yamamoto

  Body of water found beneath Canada is larger than all the Great Lakes combined.

  Huge reserves of the oldest water on Earth are locked deep within the planet's crust and could be home to new forms of life, according to scientists. Geologists have revealed they have found water that is up to 2.7 billion years old in sites all over the world. They now estimate that there could be around 2.5 million cubic miles of this water buried beneath the ground.

  RICHARD GRAY, DAILY MAIL UK. Dec 2014

  PROLOGUE

  THE LEGEND OF BAD WATER

  Baranof Island, Southern Wilderness, Gulf of Alaska, 1952

  Jim Granger stood on the rock ledge and looked out over the glacier valley that would feed into the bay miles to the west. It was October, and though the magnificent blue water from Indigo Lake sparkled from the autumn sunlight, after dark it would be bitterly cold, and deadly. He needed to be back at the camp long before then.

  He turned to scan the rock face – about fifty feet further along the narrow ledge he perched upon, there was a crack in the stone that displayed nothing but a dark void, a cave entrance, the cave entrance he hoped.

  It had taken him months, no, years to find his way here. Ages ago he had done some field work for a mining company, and had developed a relationship with some of the local native Nantouk people.

  The Nantouk were an old race and had lived in the Alaskan territory for over ten thousand years. They were still distrustful of strangers, as first contact with Europeans hadn’t gone well – in the 1700s they had met and traded with both Russian and Spanish explorers – epidemics of smallpox and other infectious diseases quickly followed, near decimating the people. Then came the hunters, traders, land grabbers, and finally the miners, of which he was one.

  Getting them to open up had been a long and patience-stretching task. And it had all started when one evening an elder had talked of a legend called Bad Water, and then shown him a tooth, broken, but a big one, bigger than anything he had ever seen. The old tribesman had hinted that he didn’t find the artifact, but instead, in his youth, had battled the creature himself.

  No matter how hard Granger had pressed him for a sea location, the old man had evaded, obfuscated, and just as Granger was thinking he had misunderstood him, the old man had suggested it wasn’t from the open ocean at all, but instead from some dark, hidden place.

  Granger had been patient, coming back time and again, and working hard to become a trusted friend of the tribal group. Eventually the Nantouk elder had told him of an ancient and nearly forgotten custom. Granger had listened eagerly as the old man talked. It seemed that before gaining manhood, the young men of the tribe would be required to enter a secret place that was older than the world according to the Nantouk. It was the place of Bad Water, and using only a length of rope and harpoon, they were to catch something fantastic, and then bring their prize back to the tribe.

  The old man had then held up the broken tooth – serrated, seven inches long; it was the proof of his fearlessness, gained more than a half-century before.

  The Nantouk were first and foremost hunters and fishermen, and didn’t know the meaning of deception, so if an elder said he caught something fantastic, Granger believed him.

  Granger grinned, wiped at his dripping nose, and then leaned out to gaze at the rip of darkness in the sheer rock face. He was a geologist by profession, but he was also a fossil hunter and fanatical caver. The legend of the Bad Water was irresistible to him. He knew from his experience, whenever there was a legend there was always some germ of fact behind it. You just needed patience, good forensic skills, and sometimes a good dose of insanity to ferret it out.

  Granger’s laugh was lost in the freezing wind. He leant out further. Where he was heading was isolated, unknown and would be difficult to get to, and therefore perfect; perfect, because all of those factors might mean he’d be the first European to ever enter it.

  He eased along the ledge, being careful to balance the pack on his shoulders, and try not to look down. It was an eight hundred foot drop to the water, but even if by some miracle he survived the fall, then that cold blue liquid would freeze-burn his skin, and more than likely stop his heart in an instant.

  He reached out; a few more feet to the rip in the rock wall, and then he had its edge. He rested, waiting for his heart rate to come down as he felt the jagged stone under his palm. The cliff side was primarily diorite batholith – hard, damned hard. As a geologist, he knew that any rock, no matter how dense, under the right pressures became as elastic as rubber or could fracture like glass. One huge tectonic shift could rip open a section of the earth, and then the next shift could close it off, land-locking all manner of life forms in either a safe-harbor, or their grave. And that was exactly what he hoped for.

  Granger was buoyant, and also confident that today he would find something really memorable. Not far away from where he stood, there were rich Miocene shale layers, where abundant fossils had been found. At one time, this area was underwater, as another amateur, just like himself, had uncovered fossilized clam beds and evidence of early cetaceans that placed the site as being an ancient sea floor around the Miocene period. Jim had a theory – as the water-covered landscape began to shrink when more and more ice formed during another glacial epoch, the last giants of the waterways needed to retreat to warmer currents, or risk being stranded. And if they had become stranded, then their bones awaited him, somewhere beneath his feet.

  Granger thought of the elder’s story of catching some huge living creature. He didn’t think the Nantouk elder had purposely misled him, but that maybe time and imagination had meant things weren’t exactly as the man r
emembered them. At the least, Granger expected to find some sort of prehistoric bone yard, protected from the elements with high quality specimens prized by museums, universities and private collectors from Boston to Berlin.

  He ducked inside – there was blackness, and depth. Excellent, just what he hoped for. He knelt to check his equipment in his pack: rope, water, brandy flask, miner’s chalk, a carbide miner’s lamp, a new type of incandescent flashlight, candles as back up and most importantly, waxed matches. There was also a single picture of Violet – Vie – his wife. Jim stared at the pretty young woman, the pretty young patient woman, who waited at home with their baby daughter. Vie was his strength, and his biggest fan. She’d sit for hours, listening to him as he told her of his latest finding or exploration. There was real interest in her eyes. Sometimes he wondered whether he was here because of his own hobby-interest, or simply to bring back fantastic stories to amuse that beautiful woman.

  Jim kissed the picture and stuck it in his breast pocket, patting it. He finally pulled free his favorite mining helmet – cast iron, yellow and battered, and with his name and title engraved across the front. He’d had it for years, and it had brought him luck for every single one of them. He put it on.

  Satisfied, he stood and drew in a deep breath. Jim Granger stepped forward, but then paused. He’d told the group what he was doing, but few knew exactly where he was going. He looked around, and then crouched to pick up a shard of stone. He used it to scrape and scratch at the hard granite wall just inside on a flat surface, going over his lettering again and again until the sheet of diorite now carried his message deep enough not to be obliterated by the weather. At least for a century or two; after that, I’ll just be another fossil, he thought, grinning. He finished and leant back to admire his work.

  Jim Granger went in here – 12 Oct 52.

  “If I’m lost, a good signpost for my searchers, and if I’m not, an unforgivable piece of graffiti.”

  He tossed the rock over his shoulder, not waiting to hear it strike stone or water, hundreds of feet below.

  “Wish me luck, Vie.” He started in.

  His first impression: old, very old, and though dry at the cave mouth, he could smell salt and dampness further in. He readied his carbide lamp, carefully turning a small knob to allow water to drip onto the carbide pellets in its base. The lamp immediately started to release trapped acetylene that was then piped to a wick. He hated using the carbide lantern as the gas was highly flammable, and worse, the temperamental bastards were prone to exploding – not great in an enclosed environment. But they were the most reliable lamps available, and also their illumination lasted many hours. He’d save his flashlight for emergencies, as the batteries ran out within a few minutes.

  Granger eased himself along the fissure for the first twenty feet. It was narrow and steep, and he found he was quickly descending at an angle of about forty degrees before it flattened and opened out. He walked slowly, stopping often, a smile on his face as he lifted the lantern high to examine the indentations in the wall. The striations showed different lines of sediment that had compressed down to layers of color in the stone.

  “Hello.” He stepped in closer, his smile widening. “Mr Amphistium, I believe.” He held up the lamp to the plate-sized fossil pressed in the stone. “And you, sir, are proof of evolution.” Jim knew the species was an ancestor of the flatfish, but where the modern variety had an asymmetric head with both eyes on one side, this fossil fish had one eye in the center of the head, and the other near the edge – evidence that evolution had only half finished her job.

  He wished he had his camera, but the device was way too bulky, and he had needed to pack light for the journey to the cave. He satisfied himself with digging out his notebook and quickly jotting down some details, and doing a quick pencil sketch that he would enhance back at the camp.

  Jim waved the lamp around – two cave entrances. He’d stick to the left, and pray it didn’t branch too many times. To help, he reached into a pocket for a fat stick of caving chalk, and wrote directions and a short message on the wall.

  He stepped in further, and exhaled, looking around and whistling – on the wall there was cave art. Some of the images were faded by countless centuries, but others were more recent, perhaps only decades old. There were small figures, standing on the dark water’s edge, spears held high. There were drawings of water creatures – fish, sharks, turtles, and strange shapes Granger couldn’t recognize. There were men pulling the creatures onto stone shorelines, or in turn, they being pulled into the water. The final ones showed the unlucky ones in the dark sea being ripped to pieces, shredded and consumed by the denizens of that dark water.

  Granger had been following the ancient tableau as he continued on, moving ever lower, the temperature, strangely, getting warmer, much warmer. He entered a large flat room; must be nearly a hundred feet around, he thought, judging by the way the multiple echoes bounced back at him. He was about to continue on when a melon-sized rock caught his eye. He squatted before it, and rolled it towards himself. He drew a small pick from his belt and looked for a fracture point. He tapped it several times, the echoes mimicking his sounds before the rock split neatly in two.

  Jim’s eyebrows shot up and he snorted softly. Like a window on a world long past, the ancient continent gave up its secrets to those it deemed worthy. He smiled, and lifted one half of the stone. There was an enormous tooth embedded in the matrix. He placed his hand upon it and spread his fingers – the triangular, serrated blade extended well beyond his palm and fingertips. It was just like the Nantouk elder’s tooth, but bigger and age darkened.

  Jim loved his fossil hunting, but was by no means an expert. And this was something new to him. He tapped again at its edges, and was delighted by the tooth falling free. He lifted it.

  “You must be made of damned hard material.” He turned it in his hands. “Some sort of dinosaur… probably aquatic.” He stuck it in a pouch at his waist, looking forward to researching the find when he got back.

  Granger stood slowly, and wiped his brow. It was even warmer now. There was some volcanic activity in this area, as this was a tectonic collision point, but mostly it was just the odd shimmy and shake from minor earth tremors. He shone his light up at the ceiling, but saw nothing to worry him in the cave structure above.

  He crossed the huge room to then ease himself into another tunnel. As he turned sideways to wedge himself into the crevice, he noticed that some of the stones were raw, as though newly broken. He shone his light beam upwards again – there was a lighter patch on the ceiling – the rock had fallen recently. He exhaled, indecision freezing him for a second or two. In geological terms, fallen recently, could have meant any time in the last five minutes or fifty thousand years.

  He shrugged and decided to press on, travelling ever lower. The going was easier, but the slope was getting steeper, and he knew he had descended quite far by now, and well below sea level. Even with a light pack, it would be a wearying climb back out. He stopped to mark some more chalk messages on the cave wall, and he would do so again at the change in the geology.

  Minutes passed, and then more minutes. Granger knew he wasn’t being mindful of the time when he came to another split in a rock wall. He checked his wristwatch. Last one, he thought, aware now that he had exceeded his planned descent timing. He eased through, walking side-on for several uncomfortable minutes until he popped out the other side, and into another large chamber. He held the lamp up, and then sniffed – dampness, but not the damp smell of moss, mould or slime, but unexpectedly that of seawater. He walked slowly forward; his arm outstretched holding up the lamp. His foot kicked a small piece of rubble that bounced several times before disappearing into one of the numerous holes in the cave floor. He frowned, hearing the rock carry on bouncing as it continued its descent.

  At the center of the cave floor there was one hole, larger than the rest. This one had what looked like the remains of a rope ladder still clinging to wooden pegs at
its edge.

  Granger quickly approached, and then lowered himself to his knees, holding the lamp over the hole. A warm breeze caressed his slick face, and the smell of water was even stronger. It wasn’t the sharp tang of mineral salts that can build up at the edges of subterranean thermal pools, but more the smell of salt marshes, weed and exposed rock on a tidal edge.

  It didn’t make sense. The Arctic Gulf waters were currently around ten degrees, but this smelled like tropical water, and besides, the ocean itself was miles away. Could there be a breach somewhere below him? But even that defied logic, as he must have been half a mile below sea level by now, and the pressure should have caused an upwelling. Where he was now, should have been submerged.

  There might be another explanation – this was the home of the Bad Water. He squinted down into the hole, but could see nothing with his carbide lamp’s base shielding the illumination. He placed the lamp to the side, and pulled his pack off his shoulders so he could retrieve his flashlight. He lay flat and pointed the weak yellow beam downward. Nothing but more blackness, but he was sure he could hear the lapping of a surf, or perhaps it was the ocean sound one hears when pressing a seashell to their ear.

  He got to his knees and shone the light in an arc over the cave floor; there were several more of the holes – Swiss cheese, he thought, with some trepidation. He rose to his feet too quickly, his knee knocking over the lamp.

  “Damn it all,” he cursed and righted the lamp, but immediately smelt the unmistakable acrid odor of acetylene gas. He looked down at the simple brass and tin mechanism; it fizzed, and there was what he feared – a leak.

  “No you don’t, you temperamental sonofabitch!”

  Granger knew he had only seconds, and swung the lamp hard, flinging it to the end of the cave, and turned preparing to sprint for the crevice he had slipped through. For the briefest of seconds, he heard the clang of the brass and steel striking stone, before that small sound was quickly absorbed into the roar and flash of an explosion.