The Ebb Tide Page 5

  “The ubiquitous Finn Conrad,” St. Ives said, laughing out loud to see him there. I wasn’t quite so pleased, although I kept silent. I hadn’t revealed my suspicions about the boy to St. Ives and Hasbro, because, to tell you the truth, I felt a little small about doubting him. If he was who he appeared to be, then I was a mean-spirited scrub. If he was an agent of Frosticos, then I was a fool, and perhaps a dead fool. But what on earth was he doing in this out of the way corner of the Commonwealth? I’m afraid I stood staring at him, dumfounded.

  Finn nodded at us, touched his forehead in a sort of salute, and said he hoped we were feeling fit. “I’ll see to the horses, sir,” he said to St. Ives. “I rode bareback in Duffy’s Circus, before they sent me aloft. Three years as stable boy.” He took the reins and led the horses around out of the wind, strapping on feedbags with an easy confidence.

  It turned out that Finn had brought with him a letter of introduction from Merton, in order to “set things up,” as Merton had apparently put it. Finn had traveled into Poulton-le-Sands by any number of conveyances, and then had come around over the bridge with a kindly farmer before making his way down the north side of the Bay on foot, having run most of the distance. He would have crossed the sands if the tide allowed, he said, in order to do his duty. St. Ives said that he very much believed it. I believed it, too, but his duty to whom?

  Merton had been expansive in his letter, the incident at the shop seeming to be a rare piece of theatre now that he was removed from it. He laid out the details of the hiding of the map, the production of the forgery, and an account of St. Ives’s eagerness to search for whatever it was that had gone down into the sands all that long time ago. There was a mention of the timely appearance of young Finn, whom he recommended without reservation. Even the armadillo made its appearance upon the stage. Uncle Fred, in other words, was in the know, as the Americans might say. Who else? I wondered darkly. But soon we found ourselves in the lamplit cottage looking at a joint of Smithfield ham, boiled eggs, brown bread, a pot of mustard, another of Stilton cheese, and a plate of radishes.

  “You gentlemen have your way with that ham and cheese,” Fred told us, rubbing his hands together as if he were even more pleased than we were, “and I’ll fetch us something to wet our whistles.”

  “Amen,” I said, my doubts abruptly veiled by the sight of the food, and it was fifteen minutes before we slowed down enough to say anything further, when Fred abruptly announced that it was time to go.

  He looked remarkably like Merton, but not half so giddy. There was an edge of authority to him that made you think of a ship’s captain—something that came from a lifetime of dangerous work in the open sea air, I suppose. Merton had revealed to us that his uncle had lost three people to the tide in the early days, and that he had lost his complacency at the same time, as he watched them being swept away into deep water, and he standing helplessly by. He wasn’t a large man, but there was a keen, wind-sharpened look in his eye, and he was burnt brown by the sun. I found that I was heartened by his rough-and-ready presence. He listened as St. Ives told him what we meant to do, his eyes narrowing shrewdly. His nephew’s letter hadn’t mentioned the diving chamber, but had revealed only that we would want a pilot. It was the diving chamber that threw him.

  “It’s madness,” he said. “You’ll join the rest of them at the bottom of the sands.”

  “Almost without a doubt,” St. Ives said, sitting back in his chair. “Clearly we need your help with this.”

  “You’ll need help from a more powerful personage than Fred Merton,” he said.

  “Granted,” St. Ives told him, “but Fred Merton is the one man on Earth that we do want. We’ll trust to providence for the rest.”

  Fred sat silently, watching out the window, where the wind blew the sea oats and the moon shone low in the sky. “You mean to captain this vessel?” he asked St. Ives, who nodded his assent. “And you,” he said to me, “you’ll go along as crew?”

  The question nearly confounded me. Fear, still dwelling in my mind from our previous jaunt in the chamber, showed me its ugly visage. Another moment of hesitation, and that visage would be my own. Finn was a youngster, of course, and St. Ives wouldn’t consider his going along, not under these circumstances. Hasbro’s arm was still tied up in a sling…. I nodded my assent as heartily as I could.

  Fred stood up abruptly from the table, checked his pocket watch, and nodded toward the door. The rest of us followed him out into the wind, which was sharply cold after the comfort of the cottage. Finn brought the horses around, an enviably game look on his face, and he clambered up onto the seat, holding the reins. We cast off the tarpaulin and saw to it that all was shipshape with the chamber and crane and the crane’s mechanical apparatus—a block and tackle rig running through a windlass mechanism with a heavy crank. It was double-rigged, and would allow for the separate lowering and raising of the diving chamber and a grappling hook. Our duty if we found the box was merely to grapple onto it securely, and then to stand aside and let the power of the windlass haul it out.

  “Once we’re out onto the sands,” Fred said to us, “the full ebb will leave us high and dry. It’ll be warm work then, because when the tide returns, it’ll be with a vengeance. When I say we pack it in, that’s just what we do, quick like. Hesitate, and you’re a drowned man. Do you hear me, now?” He looked at each of us in turn, as if he wanted to see in our faces that we would obey the command. I answered, “aye!” and nodded my assent heavily, becoming a drowned man not being one of my aspirations.

  We set out at once, Uncle Fred and Hasbro in a two-wheeled Indian buggy going on ahead, and the rest of us in the wagon, with Finn handling the reins. The track along the edge of the sands was solid enough out to Humphrey Head, which is a small, downward-bent finger of land smack in the center of the top of the Bay, covered with grasses and with stunted trees growing on its rocky, upper reaches. It afforded us no shelter at the edge of the sands, either from the wind or from the view of others out and about on the Bay, and of course there was no time to concern ourselves with these “others,” in any event.

  The tide was still declining, and as it withdrew it revealed surprisingly deep and narrow valleys as well as broad sand flats, the water vanishing at a prodigious rate. Entire shallow lakes and rivers, shimmering in the moonlight, appeared simply to be evaporating on the night air. It was the sand flats that were worrisome, because they might be solid or they might be quick, the difference discernible only to the practiced eye of a sand pilot.

  We left the buggy tethered to a heap of driftwood that stood well above the tide line, and straightaway ventured out with the wagon, Finn still driving, Hasbro up beside him, and Uncle Fred walking on ahead, prodding the sand with a pole to be doubly sure, Kraken’s map in his hand. Where was I, you ask? I was already ensconced in the diving chamber along with St. Ives. As you might have discerned, I had no desire to be there, and even less now that I was within that confined space, but either my natural timidity or what passed for courage still prevented my saying so. The hatch stood open to the night air, for which I was grateful.

  Chapter 6

  The Undersea Graveyard

  We had wandered a quarter mile or so out onto the sands when Fred once again stopped to study the map. Kraken had fixed the location of the sunken device by lining up a blasted tree above Silverdale with a chimney pipe atop a manor house beyond it and away to the northeast. Fred walked along a line defined by the tree and the chimney pipe until he was very near dead center on yet another pair of conspicuous points, the spire-like pinnacle of a high rock atop Humphrey Head, and a stone tower on a hill off in the distance toward Flookburgh. He gestured the wagon forward, stopping it a few short feet from the edge of what turned out to be a broad pool of quicksand.

  “This is what we call ‘Placer’s Pool,’ hereabouts,” Fred told us. “It’s always quick, never solid. A man named Placer and his bride went down into it in a coach and four, with their worldly goods, because they w
ere in a flaming hurry and didn’t bother to hire a pilot, but left it up to the driver to find a way. The fool found it right enough, but it wasn’t the way they had in mind. If your man was bound from the shore opposite to Humphrey head, then…” He shook his head darkly. “The good Lord alone knows what you’ll find down there, because no one else has stepped into Placer’s Pool and come back out again.”

  It was then that I began to grasp the obvious truth, although of course it should have been plain to me all along: we weren’t plunging into a pool of water this time, but into a pot of cold porridge, so to speak. It came into my mind simply to admit to St. Ives that I’d rather be pursued by axe wielding savages than to drop blind into a pool of quicksand, but I sat there mute, trying to distract myself with the goings-on outside, looking at the grappling hook where it dangled in the grip of one of the craft’s pitiful claws. My mind argued senselessly with itself—whether it would be courageous to admit my cowardice and stay topside, or cowardly to fear admitting it, descend into the murk, and risk going insane. There would be no opening the hatch in these waters, I told myself insidiously. I pictured Bill Kraken, hurriedly sketching his map in the moonlight, corking it up in a bottle, and heaving it end over end toward solid ground, and I very much hoped that there had been something in the bottle to drink before it became a mere glass mailbag.

  But of course there wasn’t a moment to lose. Fred looked at a pocket watch, shouted, “Thirty minutes by the clock!” and St. Ives shut us in tight. We were lifted bodily by the crane, Hasbro turning away with one arm on the windlass crank as if letting down an anchor while Fred held the horses steady. The sound of their voices and labor seemed to come from some great distance as we swung out over the pool of quicksand, me gripping the metal edge of the circular bench as if it were the edge of a precipice.

  “Surely the tide won’t return in a mere thirty minutes,” I said to St. Ives.

  “No, sir,” St. Ives said. “But we must agree upon an absolute limit, you see. In thirty minutes we’ll either have failed or succeeded. If we succeed, they’ll drag the box out bodily with the crane. If we fail, they’ll drag us out.”

  “Good,” I said. “Good.” In fact I liked this very much. Thirty minutes, I told myself. Almost no time at all…

  The myriad sounds of the living chamber rose around us, and we began to descend, St. Ives sitting there mute, attentive to his business, not a furrow of concern on his brow. I was already in a cold sweat, trying to manage my breathing, sending my mind off to more pleasant, imaginary, places, only to have it return ungratefully an instant later, not taken in by the ruse.

  Now there was nothing outside the ports but brown, mealy darkness, the wall of congealed sands illuminated by the interior lamps. Our tanks were full of ballast to hurry our descent, but even so we drifted downward very slowly, the sand shifting around us, gently disturbed by our passing, with suddenly clear windows of trapped water that closed again at once.

  “Two fathoms,” St. Ives said. And then after a time, “Three.”

  “What lies beneath us?” I asked, suddenly curious. I hadn’t given any thought to our destination.

  “Ah!” St. Ives replied, glancing at me. “That’s an excellent question, Jack. What indeed? More of this quicksand, lying on a solid bottom, perhaps, in which case we’ve almost certainly failed unless we land square on the wagon, because our movements through this sand would be both sightless and slow.” He shook his head. “Or it might be that…” He paused now, staring hard through the port, where there had floated into view the face of a wide-eyed sheep, looking in on us with a certain sad curiosity. Most of it was invisible in the heavy sand, and we could make out only its ghostly visage. It appeared to be perfectly preserved in this dense atmosphere, or more likely only recently drowned. We seemed to draw it along downward for a moment, as if it heeded our departure, but then, like an image in a dream, it faded into the silent darkness overhead.

  “Six fathoms,” St. Ives said. “I believe we’re descending more rapidly.”

  “The water seems to be clearing,” I pointed out hopefully. “Do you see that broken oar?” It floated some distance away, a piece of an oar weighted down by an iron oarlock. At the depth of the sheep just minutes ago it would have been hidden from us. The sand swirled in an upward flowing current now, as if clear water were rising from beneath us. Then abruptly there was a clattering noise, something hitting the underside of our craft, and we emerged into water that was pellucid as a pail full of rain, and a sight that was utterly uncanny.

  A small, upright wooden chair that our craft had apparently driven downward, now bumped and floated its way upward past the ports, and I peered out to watch its ascent. The sand layer hung overhead like a layer of thick clouds, and floating beneath it was a scattering of wooden objects, topsy-turvy chairs and tables from someone’s drawing room, lost to the sands and now forever trapped beneath the heavy ceiling.

  “We’ve come through the false bottom,” St. Ives said, “at just over ten fathoms.”

  “The false bottom of what?” I asked, letting in a whoosh of air in through the pipes.

  “The bottom of the Bay, Jacky. Into subterranean water. I’ve long suspected that there was communication between Morecambe Bay and some of the inland lakes—Windermere and Conniston Water, and perhaps north into the great lochs. There! Do you see?”

  And indeed I did. An illuminated area of the actual seabed was clearly visible below us now, alive with great, feathered worms reaching out of holes in the sand, and colorful anemones the size of giant dahlias. A pale halibut, large as a barn door, arose from the bottom and winged its way into the darkness as if we had awakened it, and then a school of enormous squid slipped past, watching us with large eyes that reminded me of the face of the suspended sheep.

  With a soft bump we settled into the sand, St. Ives attending to his levers, and almost immediately we were off, striding along on our crooked legs. St. Ives was surer of himself now, having honed his skills on the bottom of the Thames. “We’ve got about two hundred feet of line,” he told me, “and so we’re on a short tether. Some day we’ll come back prepared to do a proper investigation…There’s something!”

  There was indeed something—what appeared to be a stagecoach of the sort you might have seen on the Great North Road a century past, when coaches were more elegant than they are today. It stood upright on the sands as if it were a museum tableau—a very dusty museum. The wheels were buried to the axles, the exterior covered with undersea growths—barnacles and opalescent incrustations, decorated by Davy Jones. The skeletons of four horses were tethered to it, and there were human skeletons inside, still traveling hopefully. Household objects littered the sea floor: pieces of luggage, crockery jars, broken crates spilling out bric-a-brac, porcelain vases, an iron teapot, a fireplace screen, bottles, a heavy crystal goblet half full of sand. A small bookcase miraculously stood upright, its glass doors unbroken, the books still standing on the shelves, held in place only by the rigid leather covers, the contents no doubt having melted into mere pulp like a lesson in humility. Fishes swam around and between the lumber of objects, enjoying their inheritance.

  As the chamber strode shakily through this undersea museum it was easy for me too imagine what had transpired: the passengers, no doubt the Placer family, crossing the sands in order to avoid the extra few hours of travel around the top of the Bay. The weather had been fine, the sands apparently dry and solid. But then suddenly not so solid—the wheels abruptly mired, the horses stumbling forward, sinking to their withers, thrashing to get out, but simply propelling themselves deeper into the mire, the passengers and the driver pitching the cargo overboard—anything to lighten the load, but all efforts utterly useless except to assure the victims that their worldly goods would be waiting for their arrival at the bottom of the sea.

  It was St. Ives’s notion that we were within a vast oceanic cave with a perforated roof, if you will, the quicksand pits created by upwelling currents, which accou
nted for the suspension of the sand particles and for the firm sand flats and cockle beds in the Bay above, which lay on solid tracts of seabed. There was something immense about the darkness that surrounded us, and it seemed quite possible that this hidden, underwater world, an ocean beneath the ocean, might pass well beyond the shoreline of Morecambe Bay.

  And then we saw it: Kraken’s wagon, gradually appearing within our halo of light. I had almost forgotten about it, so caught up was I with the strange nature of the dead place where we had found ourselves. The wagon was settled on a solid bit of sea floor, washed by currents. There was no skeleton, thank God, but that meant only that poor Bill’s bones numbered among the billions scattered across the vast cemetery that is the World Ocean. In the bed of the wagon, beneath a shroud of silt, lay the wood and iron strongbox that contained the device, whatever it was—something worth the death and injury it had engendered, I hoped.

  St. Ives looked at his chronometer, and then immediately set to work with the levers that manipulated the grappling hook. On either side of the crate there were what appeared to be leather-covered chains that functioned as handles, and I watched as our mechanical arm extended, its claw reaching out with the hook…. Too far away. We crept closer, bumping up against the side of the wagon with a muted thud. Again the arm reached out.

  I became aware of something then: a light in the distance, a bright, moving lamp. It looked almost cheerful in all that darkness, like the moon rising on a dark night, and it took my mind a moment to grasp the fact that it oughtn’t to be there.

  “The submarine!” I said, for what else could it be? No sooner had I uttered the words, than the craft turned, displaying its row of illuminated ports. I could make out the dark shadow of its finny shape. St. Ives had been correct. We were in a navigable, subterranean sea, apparently open to the pools or rivers we had encountered in the underground boatyard. Dr. Frosticos had found us.