THE BROTHER OF THE MAN WHO FOUND THE GIANT SQUID
The giant squid, when finally it appeared before them, was a burnished gold. This was surprising. Surprising also was its size. Somehow it was both larger and smaller than they had expected. Small in the deep, deep sea: large suspended in front of them, just four human men way out of their depth. It lacked its two tentacles – with them its length would have been more than seven metres. Its arms clung tenderly to the bait, and it observed them with the one eye visible. The eye, they knew, was larger than a football – but, as it appeared to them now, it was obscured, slightly, by its irregular lids, shaded delicately in pink. Dr Hitomi noted the many suckers. White as a poached egg. The sub slowed to its limit: 900 metres below. There was darkness around them, and the gold squid with its eye. The eye blinked. It was beautiful.
Another scientist had recorded the first images a year earlier, but it was Goro Hitomi who captured the creature actually eating the bait. The crew grew sleepy in the gloom, blinking hard to stay awake. Many dreams on this subject had preceded this occasion, but the truth was stranger still. One scientist thought he heard a strand of music, a piano line he associated with his dead father. It seemed to reach him in waves which pulsed from the arms, and he imagined swimming out to meet the squid, putting an ear to one of those tender, fearful suckers to hear better his father’s message. He turned from the creature and its eye, and put his head in his hands for a moment.
Once the meal was consumed, the squid rotated slightly, so that neither of its eyes was infor this. Already inside him rose the panic, the slipping feeling. What next? What next? He gripped his seat.
