It had the power to transmogrify, to survive at any depth, to breath both air and water. It could subsist on literally anything it could scavenge from the lifeless ocean, and could swallow an entire ship in one gulp. And most improbably, though most importantly as well, it could turn invisible—even intangible. For this reason, the captain insisted, we had to search for the thing while it fed. Only when its belly was full, he told me, could it be discovered by sonar. And this was our greatest challenge, too: for the Beast, when fed, was in its heaviest, and therefore most dangerous, state. It could easily outweigh our hundred-foot catamaran. But how would we know when it fed, in any case? How would we find it?

“She follows the currents,” Captain Erik told me, “and so do we.”

He called it “the Beast.” It had eluded him thirty years prior to our misadventure, back when the seas were brimming with life. Erik was one of the last fishermen—a real fisherman catching real, live fish by the hundreds, in the days before the trash-trawlers. Back when he first saw the Beast, he was just a novice on a salmon trawler, the kind which devoured the ocean whole, from floor to surface. He and his crew dragged it aboard as it swallowed their catch. It was too big for them, and as it thrashed and wound itself in the ship’s tackle, it killed two of Erik’s friends, breaking one’s back and tossing the other overboard. The vessel’s captain, afraid that the angry thing might drag the entire ship down, ordered the crew to cut it loose. With axes, they hacked apart its tentacles and mandibles, much of its still-living prey still tumbling out of its maw and onto the deck as the heavy blades cut the monster loose. It slunk backwards and disappeared into the ocean depths.

Of course, I didn’t believe all this when I agreed to work for Erik. His story struck me then as the raving of a senile sailor (Forgive me, Captain), who had, in the trauma of seeing his beloved Ocean reduced to a raging toxic stew, succumbed to the romantic fantasies of seamonsters such as of old. The only reason I accompanied him on his wild goose chase was because he had advanced me a month’s pay. I took the job for perfectly ordinary, selfish reasons: I was bored and he was paying. And I figured that if the undertaking was no more than fantasy, I could return home with some easily won money.

We followed the currents as Captain Erik had promised. For nearly a month, we skated the vectors back and forth, turning on their intersections, while Erik scratched at his charts and glared at the water. It was, for a long time, as I had imagined it: Simple work, steady pay, dull rations from a can, copious instant coffee and scarce sleep. But it was no vacation.

The sea, finally defeated after millennia at war with our kind, was hardly gracious with its conquerors. Storms were common and strange. As we followed existing currents, we were regularly besieged by cyclones and junktides, often at once. Erik had armored the ship against this inevitability, reinforcing the hull so that we could hide from the refrigerators and lampposts which the winds flung from the waves. When our own relics did not threaten to kill us, hail the size of my fists would batter us from above. We once had to make port at an island because the meteoric chunks blew apart our cistern, and the fallen ice was too acidic to be melted into drinking water.

“We used to fish in storms,” said Erik once, while we hid in the galley, tied to the walls like astronauts while the sea roiled around us and unseen flotsam thundered against the thick hull. It was one of the few times he spoke more than an order or an expletive. “It wasn’t like this,” he continued in response to my disbelief. “The water was kinder, gentler. There were storms, but you could weather ‘em. Nowadays, it’s impossible… ‘Course, there’s nothin’ left to catch.” He drew a breath from a nicotine vaporizer in the shape of an old-fashioned tobacco pipe. “There’s only the Beast,” he added, “and the revenant of the sea itself.”

Despite his dramatic streak, and his absolute credence in an apparent myth, Erik always appeared lucid. He was cautious with our maneuvers and meticulous with contingencies. He had prepared, for example, an emergency craft which hung immediately off the bow of the ship: opposite to where we were to haul in the Beast, over the open stern. The bow, he explained, would be the last of the ship to go down, if the Beast dragged us under from behind. And this was possible; Erik was not willing to watch it slip away again.

“It’s taken me thirty years to prepare this ship—to prepare myself. There is no third chance: not for her, not for me.”

I admit that, when the time came, I was nervous, maybe even afraid. Perhaps the captain’s stories had infected me with his credulity. Or perhaps I had succumbed to the savage and alien logic of the sea, which had shown me that what I believed to be the boundaries of truth were not so total. I had met real fear aboard Erik’s ship, the Monkey’s Paw. We had seen aircraft turbines flung spinning from waterspouts and a derelict oil rig galloping like a pale horse over a rogue wave. We sailed through a burning ocean where lightning had struck a drifting oil patch, and the wind spat fire on us when it carried the black bile into the air. So when the sonar sounded, and the captain gave the order to make ready, I did feel anxious that after everything, the Beast might prove him right. There was yet another troubling detail: the cyclone looming dead ahead of us as we rode the current’s prevailing path.

Glancing at the familiar screen of the sonar console, I attempted to reason with myself. The massive thing passing in silence below us could be a sunken ship or, judging by its colossal, asymmetrical shape, a fleet of them. I wondered aloud if it could be a mountain, but Erik, breathing heavily and agitated in a way I had not seen even when our very lives were in danger, dismissed the idea with a hint of lust.

“Mountains don’t swim, Boy.”

He was right: the thing below us, however enormous, was moving.

We took our formation on the bridge, as we had rehearsed on calm days. Erik steered and watched the sonar display while I stood at a control panel which operated the twin cranes on either side of the ship. Their long, sturdy arms arched over the water, dangling between them, as if presenting a monstruous necklace, a steel cable adorned with heavily weighted harpoons. Mounted on the wall, we had ready an arsenal of pruning poles and hacksaws to disembowel the Beast once we pulled it aboard. Erik was certain that draining its stomach was the only way we could prevent its weight from sinking us.

I had been surprised to learn that we did not need bait. The Beast was strong and elusive, Captain Erik explained, but it had its weaknesses too: a slow pace; soft, thin, porous flesh; and not least of all an appetite for anything it could swallow.

“Now!”

I released our trap, and the steel line dropped like a guillotine into the dark waves. We watched the control panel measure the depth of the line, and waited for it to match the depth of the mass below us. Our aim was true: the weights met resistance, and the line began to slacken.

“Reel’er in—slow at first, like we practiced.”

I began to raise the crane. It returned without tension: a miss. The captain unleashed a string of assorted swear words. Following the Beast, we moved with the current, drawing nearer to the cyclone. Swelling ahead of us, the storm devoured more and more of the horizon.

The captain disabled the accelerator and let the thing swim past us once more. Then, with excruciating patience, he motored forward until we were back in position over its enormous body. I watched as the sonar signal returned again with its indisputable reading: something swimming below us. Erik continued forward, over his prize and nearer the storm.

“Now!” he barked again.

I dropped the snare. Again, we were on target. Again, the thing beneath us—Beast or burden—refused to bite. We tried again.

“Now!” Erik screamed. “Now! Now!”

I brought the harpoons up again and again.

Acid rain began to pelt us. The wind rose. We could feel the cyclone, its bull’s breath huffing threats of a mortal charge. We could not battle the storm and the catch. The captain made a decision. There was no time for me to stop him.

“Get on the controls,” he ordered as he stripped down to his underwear, “and get into position.” With a strip of duct tape, he affixed a double-edged handsaw to his hairy thigh. “Watch the sonar. Drop me when we’re ready. Bring ‘er to depth, count to thirty, then bring ‘er up.” So this was his backup plan: to hook the Beast himself. He was mad after all.

Erik began to walk away and then turned back to me, not a hint of doubt in his eyes. “Don’t fuck up.”

I watched in horror as his bare feet carried him across the pitching deck. He scaled one of the cranes and then shimmied with impressive grace along the cable. He lowered himself onto one of the weights and perched there above the barbs of its harpoon, his feet supporting him as his hands held the line for balance.

Of course, I considered hauling us off course. With the controls in my hand, I could have turned the ship around right there and ended the chase once and for all. But in the weeks I had spent aboard the Monkey’s Paw, Erik and I had bled together, dressed each other’s wounds, and, I admit, even prayed together. I had learned to trust the captain. But I knew his rage and feared him, too—feared the lengths to which he might resort if betrayed. So I did as I had seen him do: I eased off the accelerator, fell behind, motored forward, and then, when the target was just slipping out of sonar range behind us, I released the cranes. Turning around, I barely caught a glimpse of Erik as he went down.

I swear I saw him smiling.

When the harpoons made depth, yet again, I followed protocol. I counted to thirty, and set the cranes to rise, hoping that Erik would still be hanging on when they surfaced. But this time, something changed. I felt the Monkey’s Paw shudder, heard the cables groan on their winches. The harpoons had snagged something.

I tried to recall the captain’s orders from our drills. It was imperative, he had explained, that the ship pull forward as it reeled in the catch, so that it didn’t come up from directly underneath, and tip us over backwards. I pushed the accelerator forward and heard the engine, the cables, the cranes all groaning. Around me, the rising winds had pummeled the water into chop, bucking the ship and smearing the deck with brown water splashed over the gunwales, carrying with it torrents of bottles and buckets. Somewhere below me, Erik was tumbling around in that dirty water.

I increased torque on the winches, and felt the lines pull the ship back. My fear, compounded by the certainty that I was now alone, exploded into panic. I thrust the accelerator forwards, pushing the ship into high-gear. Belowdecks, the engine roared and then, with a single, deafening bang, went utterly quiet, its death sighs drowned out by the swarming winds and rattling of water against the walls of the bridge. The cranes continued to heave at the sea’s dark midden while the rolling waves teased them, shocking their line with brief moments of slack followed in an instant by uncompromising tension, clapping like the line of a giant gallows. I saw the cranes bend before the bow of the ship rose and then flopped down on the undead water, knocking me onto the wet floor. The Beast was fighting back.

I stood, trembling from cold and terror, and hopelessly, dumbly flung the accelerator backwards and forwards, praying that the engine would magically revive and grumble onward. And to whom did I direct my supplications but the Beast, that it might break our lines and free me. If it did, I promised meekly, I would never again sink another harpoon.

My only hope, I figured, was to free the cables from the cranes altogether, and let the whole apparatus slide, like so much of our refuse, into the ruined sea. But the emergency release did not work. I pounded at the button with the bottom of my fist, but it was no use; Captain Erik had disabled it. He had warned me: There would be no other chance. I cursed him, cursed myself. How stupid I was to follow him here.

I clamored afore, hoping to reach the pitiable lifeboat, now twirling like a leaf in a hurricane. The bounty of the Ocean was dancing about me now: televisions and folding tables spun past like frisbees; car batteries sailed like improvised canon shot over the deck. A rubber bath toy in the shape of a tugboat hit me in the chest with a despairing squeak, and I believe it was at that moment that hope abandoned me. The ship, pulling vertically on the Beast, had lifted its bow out of the water, and the attempts I made to crawl forward were futile; I merely slid backwards as the vessel continued to tumble and bathe. I was crawling across the bridge floor, seeking the hatch which led to the relative safety of the galley, when I noticed something on the sonar. The Beast had almost surfaced.

I can’t say now whether curiosity or despair caused me to hesitate, to turn and gaze upon my doom. The thought did cross my mind that I would have liked to at least glimpse the legend about to consign my own foolhardy demise to the shameful realm of the unbelievable. I knew already that the sailors back home would never for a moment consider that we had crossed a remote shred of evidence that such a creature existed; they would say we drowned like so many garbage riggers rolled over into the same sea we sought to salvage. And of course, they would be correct. In the end, it didn’t matter whether it was the Beast, freak weather, or some hulking piece of scrap which would drag us down.

But I can tell you this: For an instant, when its undulating, belching, spewing, writhing, form first reared from the water, I did believe. I saw with my own salt-stung eyes, stumbling over the sight just as my hands and feet were stumbling over the treacherous deck, the variegated Beast and its countless appendages. And I saw, attached like a spider to the underside of its webbed body, Captain Erik, gasping, choking, spluttering—and sawing away at his old enemy. Upside down, he tipped his head back and shot me with his red eyes.

“We got her attention now, Boy!”

The miraculous return of the captain restored my senses and my memory. I lunged for the cranes’ controls, and initiated the final step: rotating them over the deck, so the beast could be dragged aboard. Still dangling from its distended gut, Erik kept making his incisions, releasing cascades of undigested refuse: buoys, bones, oars, anchors, petrified coral, timber, a lawnmower. The Beast was so close that I could smell its rancid feast, and I could see it for what it truly was: an enormous trawling net which had been drifting across the ocean for three decades, swallowing everything it touched. At last, I understood Erik’s obsession. We were not collecting a debt owed him by the sea. We were there to repay one.

I grabbed a pruning pole, and slid across the deck to where Erik was doing battle with his foe, each vying—one through sheer will, one through infinite patience—to make the other his prey. I reached for the net with my pole, but I slipped and dropped it. Erik, who had just breached another hole, ordered me to focus instead on clearing the deck. As he drained the Beast of its bounty, I followed after, shoving the garbage aft and away, into the water. Still more of the net trailed deep into the sea, however, and as the waves became increasingly violent, the Monkey’s Paw, already precariously pitched back, began to list and pivot like a drunk on his heel. The cyclone was grasping at us in earnest, now, and the quills of the ocean surface were in full flight: an artificial Christmas tree, a horrifically disfigured sex doll, a dumpster took their turns trying to kill us. A swarm of a dozen white monobloc chairs, as though blown in from a single wedding, descended like carrion gulls upon Erik and the Beast. An extension cord, traveling like an infant wyvern, tangled itself in the instruments crowning the bridge. But what ended it all was the small, pitiful lifeboat, finally unshackled from its lines on the bow, and cartwheeling apocalyptically toward Erik. Even had he heard me over the squalls, he could not have moved in time.

The force of the blow obliterated the fiberglass lifeboat and dislodged from the sundered maw of the Beast another, stranger craft. Its conical shape plated with peeling reflective alloys made it easy to recognize as a relic from the Space Ages, when we thought the answers to our problems could be found in the certainty of a vacuum. I had little time to marvel, for in another instant, I was airborne, my arms and legs flailing over the thrashing water.

I clawed my way back up to the surface, and heard myself screaming as I struggled to keep my head above the water. To my amazement, the spacecraft was still afloat beside me. I lunged for it, forgetting the Beast, forgetting poor Captain Erik, forgetting the Monkey’s Paw. By luck alone I hauled myself into the bouncing craft and used its ancient seatbelt to strap myself in. Through the open hatch, I watched the barren sea roil and seethe, and saw the Beast take a last great gulp of air as it rolled the ship over sidelong. It was just a flash; in another moment, I was tumbling again, watching the gray water and sky trade places while I tried to keep my head from battering the metal paneling behind me.

Hours passed—maybe a day—before my little vessel stopped bobbing and rolling, and I could crawl to its open door. My skin had blistered from contact with the caustic water and I was lightheaded from the spinning and swallowing. Another day would pass before a trash-trawler hauled me aboard.

The night was calm. All around me, the ocean swung back and forth while above, the wasteland of the moon glared down, still shaking the waters like a bereaved lover. And the sea, as lifeless and black as the heavens above, pulled back on the fair moon with its own gravity, the heart of one desert beating still in the arms of another.

– Jonathan Howard Sonnenberg