Weekly Drabble #364: Nature of Evil (Patreon)

This prompt comes from Henri Black with 'inspired the fairy tales', bringing us back to Sandstone Bay. Other drabbles in this arc: 247, 254, 272, 311. Enjoy!

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Nature of Evil:

“Why did you bring me here?” Cooper asked. “I go through enough bullshit dealing with the bodies, I don’t want to see what makes them.”

“Aren’t you even the least bit curious?” Raed asked, the biologist strolling alongside the detective, leading him deeper into the Sandstone Bay Aquatic Sciences Center. It was on the grounds as the Sandstone Bay Aquarium, sharing a building with the Sandstone Bay Hazardous Substances Office. “To look into the face of evil?”

“That sounds like an odd sentiment for a man of science to hold.”

“Science,” Raed corrected, “is a method of studying and evaluating the natural world, not an ideology. You have been a police office for nearly two decades, well before you moved here to our picturesque and occasionally-bloodstained islands. Are you not going to tell me that you have not personally witnessed evil?”

James was silent for a moment. He thought of cases back home, more than a decade old but that had followed him through all the years. Hollow-eyed children, dead inside. The brutalized and bloody faces of women. The ruined bodies of men left as a testament to their slow, painful deaths. Even here on Atta Loua, he’d seen the wreckage of cruelty and depravity, all of it caused by his fellow humans. “No,” he said at last. “No, I can’t tell you that. But do you think they’re evil?”

“You’ve seen what they do,” the scientist replied. “Do you not?”

There was an edge in Damji’s voice. Not a challenge, but curiousity as if he was observing the reactions of an interesting specimen. Cooper didn’t like it. “‘I cannot do evil’,” he answered instead. “‘For I do not know what evil is’.” He paused. “You remember Big Lou, don’t you?”

Raed nodded. “I do. Your point?” BL88952, or ‘Big Lou’ had been an angler seal, a former beachmaster. Once of the biggest bulls in the area, he’d been getting up in years and five years ago, he’d lost his territory and harem to a younger, stronger male. Though he’d been old for an angler seal, he was still hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of muscle, testosterone and sexual frustration, which he’d started taking out on female swimmers and beachgoers.

Regular angler seals were frequently hostile; just the population in and around the Singing Islands was responsible annually for more injuries to humans than all shark attacks worldwide. They were fiercely territorial and once they claimed a new spot of land, they tolerated trespassers even less than hippos. During their rut, angler seals got even more aggressive than dolphins could and unlike dolphins, a violently horny angler bull could and would come up on land in search of conquests, or simply to maul anything that happened to be in his line of sight. More than one laidback beach party turned into a whole lot of yelling and running as an irate bull angler seal crashed up out of the water, roaring and hurling himself towards the visitors like an enraged torpedo.

Big Lou had been even more dangerous than that; he’d hospitalized more than a dozen people, and caused several fatalities. He’d killed three men, one of which had been trying to stop him from pursuing a woman up the beach, crushed one woman to death under his bulk and drowned two others trying to ‘court’ them. A fourth had died from his attentions. There hadn’t been a lot anyone could do against a four thousand pound monster covered in blubber, thick skin and muscle – especially one canny enough to dive away from incoming boats so they could never catch him. His reign of terror ended when a Navy ship caught the behemoth sunning himself on an isolated beach and lobbed a six-inch shell into him. If nothing else, the gulls and the crabs had been happy with the outcome.

“Was Big Lou evil?”

“Ah,” Raed nodded in understanding. “I think I understand.”

Despite the injuries, deaths and trauma he’d caused, Big Lou hadn’t been evil. He’d just been an animal caught up by overwhelming, but misplaced, instincts and impulses. When lantern squid came into shallower waters and dragged swimmers down to tear apart in a grisly mass feeding, they weren’t doing it out of malice. When a barracuda took a chunk from a swimmer after seeing a flash of jewellery, they were just following their instincts to attack something that looked like a prey item. When a box jellyfish poisoned someone brushing up against them, causing paralysis and death, they weren’t trying to inflict suffering for its own sake. They were all just animals, acting on instincts they’d had for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.

For the same reason, James might hate mermaids, but only in the same way the natives of Desina had hated the Charlamat Tiger, or the people of Atta Loua and Sandstone Bay had hated Big Lou.

“You believe,” the scientist continued, swiping his card through another security door and ushering the police officer through it, “that mermaids cannot be evil because they lack moral agency. You consider them animals, then?”

“I’ve never seen anything that convinces me otherwise, Dr. Damji. Some birds can understand abstract concepts like ‘bowl’ and ‘glass’. Chimps and crows use tools. Elephants have demonstrated the capacity for revenge. Primates and dolphins have complex social structures. All of them are animals. Very smart, very complex animals but still animals. Would you call any of them evil?”

“Perhaps not, but we do have a chance to gather more insight on mermaids than we have in the last two hundred years.”

“What you have, doctor, is a killer in a cage.”

“Aquarium and terrarium, actually. It was originally made to safely study angler seals-”

“I know what it is. Semantics doesn’t change anything. We didn’t try to capture Big Lou to get a better ‘insight’ into his behaviour. We knew he was a danger, so when we had the chance to deal with him, we did it.”

“This is not the same as Big Lou, detective.”

“You’re right. He didn’t have opposable thumbs. This is worse. She’ll get out. She’ll get out and people will die. An autopsy would have given you safer insight.”

“The town council disagreed.”

“And I disagree with them. So where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us here, James. Despite your protestations, you came. So there is at least a little part of you that’s curious about her. You’ve interviewed killers before. Surely you want to do so with such a unique person of interest.”

“Somehow, I don’t think she’s the talkative type.”

“You don’t need me to tell you that you don’t need to hold a conversation to learn about someone.” When Cooper proved him right by remaining silent, the other man continued. “Come on then.” Raed unlocked the final set of doors. They were marked with a false, but strongly deterring warning.

CHEMICAL HAZARD BEYOND THIS DOOR.

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PROTECTIVE GEAR.

The scientist gestured for Cooper to follow him inside the room. “Let me introduce you to our guest.”