Dead Calm (14 page)

No, he thought then, not necessarily. Maybe he’d only imagined watching her; maybe it had already begun in his mind. At any rate, there was the horror, and there was the beginning of that awareness of depth, or of height, upon which he was impaled—seeing the body of this friend, this woman who’d been so good to him and whom he’d killed in panic to save his own life, slide into the ever-deepening abyss below him, still clearly visible at fifty feet, a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, and after she had dwindled and disappeared entirely he could go on imagining it—a thousand feet, five thousand, ten thousand, and still falling.

Jesus, he thought, I’m glad I’m carrying it around looking for a place to set it down.

He was aware then that
Orpheus’s
motion was changing. The groundswell was becoming confused as it encountered the mounting seas built up in the squall. He glanced out toward the dark turbulence of the sky in the northeast and the advancing wall of rain that was probably less than two miles away.

“Maybe you’d better call Bellew,” he said.

Without any remembrance at all of how she’d got there she was standing on the companion ladder, looking out into blazing sunlight and the encircling blue of the sea. Ten feet in front of her the golden impervious head was poised above the binnacle, and she could hear herself shrieking through the clatter of the engine.

“Go back!
For the love of God, go back before something awful happens! Don’t make it happen, don’t make it,
please don’t make it!”
Her voice skidded up over the rim into hysteria and incoherence.

There was no reply. He glanced at her briefly and then back at the compass with something of the studied avoidance of a diner looking the other way after a waiter has dropped a tray of food, as though he was as disappointed in this uncouth screeching as he had been in her selfishness. Then, with no clear idea how she’d got there either, she was back in the forward cabin, holding onto the upright pipe of the bunk frame with one hand while she ran the fingers of the other across the side of her face and upward into her hair. Something was quivering, either her face or the hand, but she wasn’t sure which, any more than she was sure whether she’d actually gone out there and screamed the warning at him or whether she’d just imagined it. No, she must have gone out, because the door was unlatched and open. She could hear it banging behind her as
Saracen
rolled.

The shotgun still lay on the bunk where she’d dropped it, the three separate, improbable pieces suddenly united and frozen into this unmistakable shape of deadliness. She jerked her eyes away from it and looked at her watch, and then a second time in disbelief. It was 12:45 p. m. Time was hurtling past her, and she was beginning to lose whole intervals of it. They were already twenty miles from that sinking boat, and by sunset, when they’d be over fifty, she would have cracked completely. Her chin still quivering, she looked around the tiny compartment again, seeing for the twentieth time only the walls of the trap, this comer she’d been backed into and from which there was no escape except one. She’d tried everything else, and it was hopeless. He was impregnable, unreachable.

Then, with the suddenness of a thrown switch, the wildness and despair were gone, and she was strangely calm. It was as if her mind had come into focus at last, with everything else dropping away until there remained only the two simple, elemental facts she’d been groping for all the time, the only two that mattered at all. John was going to die unless she saved him. And she had the means to do it.

At first she thought the engine had stopped, it had grown so quiet. But when she listened, she could still hear it; it was just farther away, and there was a faint rushing or ringing sound inside her head, as if she had been taking quinine. It was like being enclosed in some huge bubble that protected her from all extraneous sound or thought or interference. It was cold inside the bubble, and there didn’t seem to be enough air, because her breathing was rapid and very shallow, but she was invulnerable to everything beyond. She went over and picked up the shotgun.

And this was strange too, with some feeling that she’d done it before and knew exactly what she had to do. It was as if, while her conscious mind was recoiling from it in revulsion, some far level of the unconscious had already accepted the gun with complete fatalism and calmly planned its use. She had to learn how it worked. She pointed it away from her and tried to pull the triggers. Nothing happened. But she’d expected that. Guns had safety mechanisms of some kind so they couldn’t be fired accidentally. She began searching for the key to it, and found it immediately, since it was the only part of the weapon not already identified. It had to be this small oblong button just back of the lever that broke it open at the breech so you could put in the shells. She tried to push the button down, but nothing happened. Then it must slide. She pushed it forward, and it did, perhaps a quarter of an inch. She pulled the triggers and heard the clicks, one after the other, as hammers fell on the firing pins.

The shells. Still inviolate within her bubble of cold and unswerving concentration, she went out into the after cabin and knelt before the drawer. There were two boxes of them. Both had been wrapped in plastic and then covered with two or three coats of varnish to protect them from the humidity of the tropics. She’d need a knife. She was making a note of this and reaching over the medicine kit for one of the boxes of shells, when she paused. It was only for a minor part of a second, a fleeting but inexplicable hiatus of movement that was noticeable at all only because ever since she’d accepted this thing and committed herself she’d been going forward with the inevitability of some machine running downhill on rails.

Poised there on the dead center of this almost imperceptible hesitation, with the feeling that somebody was pounding on the wall of the bubble, trying to get in or to attract her attention, she looked down into the drawer, wondering what had caused it. Besides some heavy clothing they wouldn’t need until they got down into the higher latitudes, it held only those articles which, in addition to the shotgun, had to be sealed in port by customs—the shells; her cigarettes; John’s cigars; the medicine kit, because of the narcotics it contained; and several bottles of whisky and two or three of rum. Then the feeling was gone. The protective concentration closed in around her again, and she was moving ahead. She gathered up the box of shells, picked up a small paring knife from a galley drawer, and hurried back.

It took several minutes to hack her way into the box. She extracted two of the shells and set the box on the deck under the bunk. She broke the gun at the breech with the lever, dropped them in, and closed it. She was fortunate in that her very lack of familiarity with guns spared her the deadly association of those three sounds linked in sequence—the
toinnnk, toinnnk,
of the shells dropping into the ends of the tubular air columns of the barrels, and the metallic click as the breech closed and locked.

But she wasn’t so lucky with the blanket. Strangely, the blanket was worse now than the gun, and it might have stopped her except for the furious intensity of her concentration and the momentum she had already gathered. Because she knew what she had to do with it, and do immediately and without hesitation or thought; if she waited, she might never go up there at all, and the act would have been for nothing.

She set the gun down on one of the sailbags, peeled the blanket from the bunk, and held it up before her by the corners with her face averted, like a fireman approaching a blaze behind a shield. The ocean of sickness beyond the bubble surged inward and threatened to collapse it, but she looked down at her feet, her mind shored up against everything but the problem, and decided she could get up the ladder this way and across the cockpit.

She retrieved the gun, took the blanket in her other arm, and went out. The roaring in her head was louder now, so she could scarcely hear the engine. She was cold all over and wasn’t sure she was breathing at all; there seemed to be some tremendous weight pressing on her chest. She walked with a stiff-legged artificial gait, like a mechanical toy, fighting the rubbery weakness of her knees, but she was still going forward, still protected and invulnerable. She could see nothing on either side of her. Straight ahead, as if at the end of a long tunnel, the bright oblong patch of sunlight fell through the open hatch, sweeping back and forth across the ladder as
Saracen
rolled. She reached it. She stepped up on the first tread of the ladder and peered out.

She could just see over the hatch coaming, and only his face was visible as he sat in the after end of the cockpit behind the wheel. He was looking down into the compass, and his lips were moving, apparently without sound, though she didn’t know for sure because of the engine noise and that roaring in her ears. He glanced up then, straight into her eyes, but there was no recognition, no indication he even saw her. He looked back at the compass, his lips continuing to move. Somewhere inside her a voice was screaming: Now, now!

She dropped the blanket beside her on the ladder and brought up the gun, pushing the safety button forward. The barrels reached up and out, resting on the coaming in front of her, and when she put her shoulder against the stock and sighted along them they were pointing just slightly to one side of his face. She moved them over, and when she closed her left eye they were lined up, foreshortened and centered on his forehead ten feet in front of her. She could no longer breathe at all. Her right index finger, like some great unwieldy sausage, came in against the gun, felt the forward edge of the trigger guard, slipped back around it, inside, and lay against the trigger. All she had to do was pull. She tried.

She closed both eyes and let her head fall forward, wanting help from somewhere, but there was no help; she was alone, and if it was to be done she had to do it. When she opened her eyes and looked along the barrels again, the beautiful, hated, mad, impervious head was still there on the ends of them like a permanent decoration installed in a moment of gruesome whimsy by some gunsmith gone mad himself. She tried once more to pull the trigger, and then came down from the ladder with the gun, remembering just in time to push the safety back before she sank down at the foot of it. She couldn’t even cry. There were no tears left.

In a few minutes she had strength enough again to gather up the gun and blanket and go back inside the forward cabin with them. She unloaded the gun, dropped it on the bunk, and put the two shells back in the box. That ended it. She knew now. Not even to save John’s life could she assassinate in cold blood a boy who didn’t know what he was doing.

Or had she actually proved that? she wondered. Maybe all she’d really proved was that she couldn’t do it now, at one p.m., still five hours before the deadline, the point of no return. What about then, when she knew she was renouncing all hope of ever seeing him again? But she was too tired, too emptied to think about it now. She had to rest. She sat down on the edge of the bunk, and almost immediately, as the tension uncoiled inside her, she remembered that strange pause or hesitation when she was reaching into the drawer for the shells. Something had been trying to get her attention through the protective armor of concentration. What was it?

It had to be one of the things she’d seen in the drawer. The medicine kit! That was it. But why? Was there some connection with that story Warriner had told about the deaths from’ botulism and his vain attempts to treat it? No-o. But, wait. She had it then. The narcotics! Hope blossomed, and then just as suddenly it was gone and she sank back into the depths. Of course there was morphine in the kit, and a hypodermic syringe, but what good was it? It was hardly likely Warriner was going to let her stick a needle in his arm and inject him full of opiates. She stopped. Inject? No. There was something else. Then she sat upright.
Codeine!
There was a bottle of codeine tablets in it.

She ran out into the after cabin and yanked open the drawer. The medicine kit was in a wooden box with a hinged cover. She threw the cover up and began searching hurriedly through the bottles, plastic vials, and small cardboard cartons. Aspirin, paregoric, iodine, aureomycin, alcohol, sulfa, sutures—here, this was it. It was a small, square-shouldered bottle with a screw top, its neck stuffed with cotton. She lifted it out and read the typewritten label.
“One tablet for relief of pain. Do not repeat within six hours.”

There seemed to be fifteen or twenty in it. One, she thought, would make you very drowsy, depending on individual tolerance. She had no idea what a lethal dose would be, but probably anything above four or five might be fatal even to a young man in the prime of life such as Warriner. She didn’t want to kill him, even in this painless and unmessy way, but on the other hand, too small a dose would be worse than none at all. It would only warn him that he’d been drugged. Three, she thought; that should be safe enough both ways. But how to administer it?

In food, or in something to drink? There’d probably be less chance of his suspecting anything if it were in something to eat. She could pulverize three of them, mix the powder with canned potted ham or something equally spicy to cover the taste, and make a sandwich of it. No, she thought then. The chances were he was going to be suspicious of anything she offered him. Irrational he might be, but he was no fool. She thought for a moment. Then she saw the answer, and she smiled for the first time in four hours.

She slammed the drawer shut and strode back to the galley section of the cabin. Having shaken three of the tablets from the bottle, she set them on the tiny drainboard shelf next to the sink and reached up into the stowage racks for a glass. She took two teaspoons from a drawer, set one of the tablets in one spoon and used the heel of the other to crush it, pressing them between her fingers. She dropped the resultant powder in the glass and was reaching for the second tablet when she felt
Saracen
go into a hard left turn and at the same time roll down to starboard. Both the glass and the bottle of codeine tablets started to slide. She caught the glass, but the bottle escaped her and fell on deck. It didn’t break, but it rolled and slid all the way across to the starboard side, spilling the tablets as it went. She set the glass in the sink, so it couldn’t roll off too, and went lunging after the bottle. She had it and was down on her knees picking up the scattered tablets at the foot of the companion ladder when Warriner screamed just above her. He was already in the hatch, coming down the ladder.

She sprang to her feet and wheeled to run, but it was too late. When she slid through the doorway into the forward cabin he was right behind her and there was no time even to close the door. Trapped now, she turned, seeing the agony of his face and trying to will herself not to fight him. “It was a shark!” he cried out. He caught both her arms in a grip that made them hurt. “It was a shark!” And while she was still struggling with the panic inside her, she began to grasp that he hadn’t come down here to attack her. He wanted help, comfort, something he thought she could give him, and if she could soothe him, or at least keep from antagonizing him, she might survive this crisis too. And it would be the last one. Then she remembered she still had the opened bottle of codeine tablets in her hand. She shoved the hand down beside her thigh to keep them out of sight.