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looked over the rail; the surface of the tomb-deep ocean was opaque, impenetrable.
    Garth reached out with his right hand toward the spot where Kalinda last stood. “Kalinda.” He needed to hold her, and she wished she could oblige. “Kalinda?” The mahogany trim on the boat was splashed with blood, and the fabric of some of the sails was sodden and crimson. The desire to find her was so intense that his body began to shake. His legs became rubbery. She knew.
    Reality shifted for a few seconds, so there was not even the whisper of a sound. Then the world came tumbling back into focus. There was the muted crack of icicles from the nearby glacier. Swallowing hard, Garth ran back to the cockpit, pulled the door shut, grabbed hold of a microphone attached to the radio and shouted, “Newfoundland radio—this is the schooner Phantom! We have no engine. Our masts are destroyed. We need help . . .”
    Garth stopped suddenly, too full of sorrow and shock to continue.He heard the radio squawk a bunch of meaningless noise. After a few minutes he went back on deck, gazed into the sea, and called again: “Kalinda?”
    Don't look behind the cabin, she willed him.
    He heard a sound, but did not see what made it. Something flicked forward and landed on the nape of his neck. Everything went dark as he fell into the cabin below.
    The last thing he heard came from above. It was the endless cries of seagulls. He was trapped on a ship in a prison of ice and sea.
    But perhaps he would survive. The spider hadn't actually killed him. It might forget him by the time it was through with her.
    Kalinda, suspended in the absentminded grip of the spider legs, finally let her consciousness ebb. Her one remaining regret, oddly, was that she knew she would never get to tell him the content of his dream.

PART II
    Phantom
    Hunting
    The sea sheltered ample dragons to fuel the nightmares of the entire human race.
    —P ETER B ENCHLEY , Beast

CHAPTER 6
    Head
    E LMO SAMULES, ONE of the fisheries officers for Trinity Bay, always told visitors that the Island of Newfoundland was a rough coast to make a living on. Recently, however, offshore oil had begun to offer a promise of employment for thousands. Elmo had seen many changes to the area around Bonavista Bay since his boyhood. When he was only three years old, his parents emigrated from Milan to Canada after his father joined an unsuccessful fishing business. After that, the elder Elmo prospered in Bonavista Bay as a shingle manufacturer and later in the lumber business. The younger Elmo's formal schooling was limited to a year, followed by five years of instruction by his mother. He was an entrepreneur at age 17, leading fishing and whale watch boats in Bonavista Bay.
    Elmo always loved the sea and had an early and avid interest in fish and other sea life. His interest and exploration of the nearby oceans was helped by his minimal requirement for sleep. Since his teenage days, he acquired the habit of going for long periods of time with little sleep, sometimes requiring a few hours each night to be fully refreshed. Elmo was not unlearned in science; his prodigious reading had carried him through numerous scientific and popular articles on the sea.
    Today Elmo was taking Nathan Smallwood, curator of fishesfrom the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, on a tour of the eastern coast in a fiberglass patrol boat that hopped between wave crests like a flying fish. Smallwood was determining the extent to which oil companies’ submersible catamaran drilling rigs and the huge towers of Petro-Canada drill ships were damaging the local food chain. He was also here to enjoy the beauty of Newfoundland's coasts and rivers.
    Physically the two men were very different. Elmo was a large man with muscular arms wedged into a black T-shirt. He could throw a football like a cannon shot, despite an unusual configuration for his fingers. Behind the athletic facade was an encyclopedic mind, a dynamic force. Smallwood, on the