Party on Horror Beach

CHAPTER SIX

Thompson went over the underwater shot list with Roger while Charlie conducted safety checks on all of the diving gear and loaded it on the motorboat.

“I was thinking about trying to get as much footage as possible on the north end of the island, out by the burned out docks. The bottom drops off here.” He pointed to a swathe of closely spaced squiggles on his contour map. “Drops a couple hundred feet straight into the La Mirada Channel. Should make for some spectacular shots. Cliffs dropping into the black depths. That sort of thing! There’s supposed to be an old shipwreck on that side of the island too.”

Roger nodded eagerly.

“Sounds good. Sounds very good!”

“We’ll just do some swimming footage and establishing shots. I don’t want to take any of the monster suits out into deep water. They’re awkward enough as is. We’ll film the monster scenes close to shore, here, and just keep to tight shots on the action scenes.”

Roger nodded again. The suits were expensive, even if they didn’t look it, and he didn’t want to risk losing one of them. They didn’t belong to Lejo’s production company but had just been rented along with the rights to the monsters themselves from the original studios. If he lost one it would come out of his salary!

Besides, he really didn’t want to risk having an actor drown during the production, even if the resulting press would be sensational. He couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to be trapped in one of the bulky suits, water-logged and heavy as lead, while the current dragged you under, dragged you down into the black depths where divers couldn’t even reach you. To become gnawed bones rolling in the muck of the lightless bottom.

He shuddered at the image inside his head and wondered why it was so terribly clear.

Even if the sensational press would likely translate into additional percentage points at the box office.

“What the bloody hell?”

Roger was napped out of his reverie by Thompson’s outburst. The man’s British accent only came out when he was startled or excited, or drunk.

Roger followed his cameraman’s gaze and saw Rod Spencer slapping his way along the beach with flippers and full diving rig on.

“Rod, what are you doing?”

The actor pushed his facemask up and smiled broadly.

“I’m ready to do the underwater scenes!” he practically chirped.

“Rod, you know that Charlie’s doubling for you on the diving scenes.”

The stuntman already had white paste slathered through the hair on the sides of his head, to match the older actor’s salt and pepper gray.

Rod grimaced.

“I know. But I took talent training on diving right after I read the script. So I could do, I don’t know, some close ups or mid-range stuff where you can see my face. It’ll be more believable that way. Charlie can do all the serious diving and swimming around and stuff.”

Roger looked at Thompson.

The cameraman shrugged.

“It will help put things together if we have same location establishing shots with Rod on site.”

Thompson looked at Charlie who’d come running over to check out Rod’s gear while Mike got the boat ready to move out.

“Well?”

Charlie nodded, clearly somewhat impressed.

“Yeah. All his gear checks out and everything is rigged properly. He SEEMS to know what he’s doing. Can’t see any reason why he couldn’t bob about in the water and get his picture taken.”

Rod glared at him but said nothing.

“Okay, well. Great! It’ll save us time if we can get as much shot on one outing as possible. Let’s do it!”

Roger gave a thumbs up to the cameraman and his divers.

He was happy to let them get as much done as possible, while he went over lines with the girls. In his tent.

“What about what they were saying on the radio, about that Gill Man creature? Is it safe to go out in the water?”

Rod seemed about ready to ditch the whole scene, after going to some lengths to get himself included into the shooting trip.

Thompson laughed.

“Oh, the bloody Gill Man is probably halfway into the Everglades by now, being chased by Park Rangers! He’s nowhere near here.”

Really quite nearby, it dragged itself up out of the icy black deep with its long, curved talons. The Creature’s fingers spider-walked up the steep slope of sand and rocks. Its legs trailed limply behind it. The air-breathers had sprayed it with bullets during its last foray. The thick armored scales covering its torso stopped the bullets, but the brutal pummeling bruised and injured its insides. Added to that was the bone-chilling cold of the deep water it sank into while dazed, deadly painful for a tropical creature such as itself. The Gill Man was in dire need of a safe place to curl up and recuperate.

Up ahead, tilted at a precarious angle on the sandy slope, loomed the rusted, barnacle-encrusted hull of a bootlegger’s lost boat. The Creature glided up to the wreck, fingers digging into the sand to resist the undertow that tried to drag it back down into the deep water. When it was near enough, it reached out and gripped the edge of a jagged hole in the boat’s side. Gracefully, it pulled itself up and into the wreck with a movement that was part pirouette and part one-handed chin-up. A cloud of silvery fish scattered as it glided among them.

Safe inside the wreck, the Creature rested. It sucked in great gulps of seawater, which still burned the delicate tissues inside its mouth and throat and gills. It preferred freshwater. The peaty taste of rotting wood inside the wreck calmed it, though. The musky aftertaste of stale flesh piqued its curiosity. Nosing about, nudging flotsam and crumbly bits of debris aside, it found surprisingly well-preserved corpses hidden inside the flooded staterooms. They were long dead, but for some reason the sea-creatures had declined to feed on them, so despite being buried at sea for many years, their corpse flesh was wrinkled, almost pickled by sea-brine, but still mostly intact.

The Creature cupped a deadman’s jaw and lifted the face toward its own. The amphibious beast, hunted and far from its native waters, found it oddly relaxing to stare into those empty sockets, to trace the lipless, toothy grin with a single, hooked claw.

It had no idea how long it floated in reverie, staring into the drowned man’s face. Time passed differently for the antediluvian creature, part of the secret of its long survival while the World fluttered and changed around it. But it was shaken from its peaceful repose by dull thuds hitting the water not far away. A muted burbling tickled its ears. The Gill Man knew what that sound meant. It was the sound of air-breathers invading its realm. Those sounds usually led to struggle and death. Never its own.

The Creature’s black fishy eyes irised open. Its mouth gaped wide, then snapped shut hard. With a kick and a couple sweeps of its wide webbed hands, it glided through the wreck, twisting and tumbling until it reached an algae-smeared porthole. Impatiently it rubbed the blurry glass clear. And there they were! Humans, slapping their feet awkwardly and rocking side to side as they swam by, long lines of silver bubbles trailing behind them.

The Creature uttered a guttural growl, then drifted back from the porthole, disappearing into the wreck’s dark interior, before the invaders could spot it.