Free The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni Page B

column of steam. She had made a home for the animal on her bureau. The octopus lived in her bedroom now, directly below mine.
    Somehow this made it difficult to sleep. Last night I had lain awake for hours, aware of that monster lurking in the darkness. Its alien intelligence. Its bizarre, oblong eyes. I had been having nightmares. Imagining I heard the octopus slithering in the hallway. The wiggle of his tentacles. The kiss of his suckers.
    Twenty minutes later, I was on board the Janus for the first time. The sun had not yet risen as we skimmed across the water. A smoky layer of fog obscured the eastern horizon, rendering the light diffuse. The sea itself was as black as tar. We were heading north. The islets there were prehistoric—the sort of rugged, primal peaks that might have appeared behind a group of dinosaurs in a documentary. Even the mist seemed uncanny. Each island wore a belt of gauzy white.
    I swear that I smelled the blood before I saw it. Tangy, oily. A group of seagulls was wheeling beside Sugarloaf—a bulbous promontory, aptly named. The birds were screaming. I watched three of them get into a swordfight of flashing beaks. Then a patch of mist moved aside, curtains parting at the theater, and the blood appeared. It was phosphorescent, spilled across the surface of the sea. It glowed against a landscape of gray. (I have since learned that a seal’s blood is so highly oxygenated that it just about fluoresces when exposed to open air.) The torn carcass was still visible, bobbing on the waves. The seal was human-sized. Purple strips of flesh. A tail as broad as a catcher’s mitt. It had no head. Whatever killed it had decapitated it cleanly. Blood was still fountaining from the raw wound where its neck had been. I leaned over the side of the boat, wondering if I was about to throw up.
    I have learned too much about white sharks lately. I know that, as a species, they predate the existence of trees. I know that they have survived four global mass extinctions. I know that they are born live, not hatched out of eggs like most fish. The pups emerge fully formed, about four feet long, with their predatory instincts already buzzing. White sharks have their own sixth sense, used for detecting prey: they can pick up the electrical impulses generated by muscles in motion. They can also smell blood in the water from a mile away. Their odd manner of swimming, the snout swinging side to side like a pendulum, helps them to track exactly where the scent is coming from. To me, it seems reminiscent of the way human beings tilt their heads to locate the source of a distant sound.
    I know that white sharks are warm-blooded. Unlike other members of their species, they do not start out each day sluggish and chilled, waiting for their nervous systems to fire up, gradually accumulating enough energy for the hunt. White sharks are always ready to hunt. They are unique in other ways, special and bizarre. They sometimes breach like whales, leaping clear of the sea. Nobody is sure exactly why they do this—to scope out the nearby surroundings, to shake off clinging remoras. Maybe they do it for fun. They have even been known to land on boats. Indeed, a few registered victims of shark attacks were killed outside the water, the accidental casualties of a two-ton fish leaping jubilantly but carelessly, unaware that its bulk was heading not for the open sea but for a hapless ship in the line of fire.
    This morning, Forest was at the helm of the Janus . Galen had his binoculars in hand. The seagulls were busy, a mass of wingsabove the iridescent slick. I snapped photo after photo: mist-soaked islands, bloodthirsty birds, and a splotch of crimson burning like a bonfire.
    Then Forest cut the engine, pointing into the ocean.
    “Look there,” he said.
    “What?” I said, stepping forward cautiously.
    The surface of the water did seem strange. A bulge had appeared, different from the choppy waves. Moments later, a fin broke the surface.