East of Suez by Howard Engel

made my way down from the pavement, across a scrubby incline, to the beach proper. I soon had sand in my shoes. Others were joining the crowd as I did myself. We wanted to know what the fuss was all about.
    Spread out along the waterline was a giant squid. Most of it looked like a ton of raw liver, but the rubbery tentacles were the giveaway. The suckers on the twisted loops of tentacles were over an inch across. Their color also reminded me of raw liver. There was no sign of what had killed it, and it hadn’t been caught in one of the fishing nets further down the beach. Just one of those mysteries the sea throws up from time to time. A reject from fifty fathoms down. I looked at it as I would have looked at a visitor from another planet. It seemed to hit my fellow gawkers the same way.
    “ Architeuthis! ” a voice said beside me. It belonged to a young woman in a T-shirt and shorts. She was bronzed by the sun and her hair was as blond as corn silk. “Isn’t she beautiful!”
    It’s unnerving to have your very thought stolen from you even as it is forming. Only she meant the raw meat on the shoreline. “She belongs to the Cephalopoda, same family as garden snails. Poor dear, she’s got all twisted in her prehensile arms.”
    “Those long sticky things?”
    “Right.”
    “I thought they were sex organs. That’s a relief.”
    She turned to look at me: at first seriously, like I was a slug on a microscope slide, then she broke into a broad smile.
    “I’m Fiona Calaghan,” she said. “Who are you?”
    I told her, and she tried my name on her tongue a few times before she was ready to collect the rest of my basic information.
    “You’re a friend of the priest, Father What’s-his-name.”
    “Father O’Mahannay. That’s right.”
    “He wants to hear from you. He thinks you’re putting your immortal soul in hock to the powers of darkness. Call him.”
    “I’m glad somebody’s worried about it. I’ve been too busy. How do you know him?”
    I told her I was on holiday, that I’d shared a taxi with her friend the priest on the way from the airport.
    “What a wonderful way to begin your trip,” she said. “There’s nothing worth knowing about this place that Father O’Mahannay doesn’t know. You landed on your feet, Mr Cooperman.”
    “Call me Benny. All my friends do.”
    “So you’ve already got me down for a friend, have you?”
    “I hope it ends up that way. Tell me about the tsunami. Were you here then?”
    “Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it. So many people lost, such damage here on land, and just as bad out there, at sea.”
    “I saw the pictures on television. I’m sorry.”
    “You’re sorry for nature, Mr Cooperman. That’s nice.” She was laughing at me, I thought. “You know, we know far more about the moon’s surface than we know about the bottom of this ocean. Any ocean.”
    A fisherman emptying a plastic barrel from the side of his scooter-truck splashed both of us with seawater. It was salty, smelling of iodine and seaweed. I didn’t mind it in this heat, but Fiona got more than her fair share of it. The fisherman came over, giving us the pointed-hands bow along with an unintelligible explanation. We moved along the beach, drying off in the sun.
    “He didn’t see us,” she said, with a glance back at the fisherman and wringing out the tail of her shirt. Fiona was beautiful. No two ways about that. Her wet T-shirt brought to attention all of my dozing masculinity. Scanning my face and seeing the usual signs, Fiona’s smile went indoors. She had grown used to my sort of sudden enthusiasm. The story of her life, if I had time to hear it.
    “Is that what they call a giant squid?” I asked, with a backward glance, to change the unspoken subject. “I thought that only a few of them are seen in a century.”
    “They live a long way down. I don’t know what’s up here for them. Nothing but low pressure and sudden death.”
    “Father O’Mahannay told me you were an