Firefly Gadroon (20 page)

‘Keep trying, Lovejoy.’ Breathless but calm.

‘I’ll help you nick antiques, Devvo,’ I babbled, ashamed at myself. I’m pathetic.

‘Not now, you won’t.’

‘Please, Devvo. I’ll take back what I said about you killing Drummer.’

‘That old fool had to go, Lovejoy,’ Devvo called back. ‘Like you, mate. I’ve too much to lose.’

‘You’re not going to leave me, Devvo?’ Crawler.

‘I am that.’ His voice was receding.

‘I know where there’s stuff worth millions, Devvo.’ My screech echoed within the cellar. ‘Please, Devvo. It’s here. There’s a ton of chrysoberyl—’

Aghast, I heard them talking about fog outside as their footsteps sounded above. I even heard Jimmie the goon ask Devvo for a match and Devvo’s reply, ‘No smoking till we’re outside. We don’t want Old Bill finding clues all over the place.’ He didn’t believe me, the moron, the sadistic killer.

The steps sounded fainter. I thought, this can’t be happening to me. Not to
me.
It can’t happen. People will
come. Devvo will turn back. Maudie will arrive. Dolly will bring the police. The Navy’ll see the boat . . .

Then they had gone and I was where I’d always feared. Finished.

Darkness is the worst. Well, second worst. Second to being entombed.

I’m not scared of dark places. No, honestly I’m not. No more than anyone else. And solitude’s a precious commodity, if you like that sort of thing. But being at the bottom of the sea bed sent me demented. I sweated and shivered, shouting and pleading though Devvo and his goon were no longer in earshot. I yelled incoherent explanations of the chrysoberyl, promises, bribes, anything.

Sobbing in fear, I hurled myself repeatedly at the ceiling, foolishly hoping to reach the rectangular opening’s margin. Once I even thought I touched it but nearly broke my bloody ankle falling on the rock. I battered upwards with the ladder. I begged and pleaded, wept and screeched abuse. In those few minutes I regressed from
Homo sapiens
through a few million years, finishing up a shambling whining hulk whimpering and scratching in a cave. I became again a feeble thing of reflex,
Homo neanderthalis
, an animal with less brain than Germoline. Utterly disgusting. Fright made me pee repeatedly, hardly a drop every time. I almost knocked myself senseless against the projecting slab. I cursed it soundly, regaining my old anger. Stupid bloody army engineers, leaving one great slab like
that sticking out. You could brain yourself on it if you weren’t careful. And what for? Typical, just typical. You’d think they’d have just built this lunatic place and got the hell out.

Then gradually I was brought back to my senses. Perhaps it was rage at the fort’s builders. Or at Devvo. Or at the plight I was in. Or just me. Or at everybody in good old East Anglia beering up and snogging and going about their lawful business, selfish swine, with me left to die miles offshore out there –
here
– under the ocean.

‘Oooh,’ I moaned, terrified.

Whatever else, I had to keep that horrible thought from my mind. Ignore the reality of cold, of silence and darkness. Think.
Think.

Think of Germoline, waiting out there by Drummer’s shed, trusting in me to come back loaded with antiques. Think of the engineers under the impetus of war, slogging night and day in the cold and mud out here. I sat on the fallen ladder and slowly and ever so slightly began to cerebrate.

My head was still ringing from catching it on the projecting slab. What was it I’d just said to myself? . . . You’d have thought they’d just have built this lunatic place and got the hell out? But they hadn’t. They
hadn’t.
They’d most carefully made, deep down at the bottom of one supporting pillar, a single projecting slab. Apparently for nothing. Nothing could lean on it. A winch bar, then? No. Nothing could be winched up to it – you build winches at the top of places, not in cellars. Some architectural necessity, then . . . but what? I know nothing about architecture, especially of sea forts, but no amount of thinking could explain the projection. The fort itself was huge. Its four supporting pillars were huge as well. This projecting slab, big as it seemed, was relatively small compared to the fort.

A strange unease settled in my belly. Whereas I’d been scared out of my skull a few minutes before, a coldness came in me now, fear of a totally different kind. Something horrid underlay all this. Something old man Hepplestone possibly knew about and which was gradually starting to dawn on me. My white-hot panic vanished. My mind plodded on to a clear frosty logic.

A construction team, labouring hard out in a dangerous ocean, struggling to erect this sea fort in the hectic rush to war, doesn’t pause to build something useless a million fathoms down. Local legend says they lost a man a day from drowning or injury on every single fort. Add to that the bombing, the worry about enemy ships . . . I was suddenly too scared to move. Counterbalanced. Exactly what was counterbalanced?

‘Keep calm.’ My voice echoed funereally, scaring me worse. Hepplestone’s cage. You pressed it down, and a bit of the floor had pivoted aside.
Counterbalanced?

The way down had been carefully locked so that I’d had to improvise a battering ram to get in. And only the C.O. or his aide were allowed down, even though it led nowhere. Cellars
never
go anywhere. Everybody knows that. The glamorous image of a retreating swordsman came back to me again, retreating stair by stair. Suppose the fort was stormed. A brave C.O. might want to sacrifice everything to save a fortress falling into an enemy’s hands so close to shore. Or he might have
orders
to . . . to . . . Jesus. I swallowed, my throat dry. No wonder it was locked, the doors solid metal. Something was mined, or self-destructive. And I was in it. And I knew now what was counterbalanced. It was the slab. Somehow it pivoted. And it could be done by one person, ‘The C.O. or authorized Acting C.O.’, the notice had said.
Or.
Therefore not both. Therefore even a knackered Lovejoy could unbalance it on his own, after which . . .

I went ‘Oooh’, sitting still, frightened to move a muscle. Supposing I did manage to turn it. What the hell happened then? Maybe it would prove a way out – into the frigging sea. Who needed that, for gawd’s sake? I’d seen enough films to know that the bloody sea’s crammed with sharks and tentacled monsters. A pivoting slab in a wall would let the whole frigging North Sea into my black prison – definitely bad news. Worse, supposing it
did
let me out?
What else did it do?
That ghastly feeling of being in a mine recurred. How long did mines take to blow up once you set them ticking? Or do mines only tick in comics?

I tried to talk myself out of it. ‘It’s all make believe,’ I said aloud. Sweating clammily, I brought up, perfectly sound reasons for the War Department being too careful to leave sinister explosives in our trusty old sea forts.

Aren’t they?

One thing I could do, meanwhile. If I was going anywhere I’d at least take a piece of the chrysoberyl with me. The ladder would help to bash a piece of the scaggy rock floor free. Careful, though, to stay away from the projecting slab in case I unbalanced something in the darkness.

I got down on my knees and began feeling the rock. My torch was broken. I’d have given anything for my pencil torch. I laid the ladder pointing at where I remembered the projecting slab to be and took bearings from that, using feel. Then I quartered the cellar in my mind and set to, my fingers fumbling across the rock inch by inch.

Chrysoberyl looks like nothing on earth, just rock with faint greens and yellows and the odd brownish-creamy material. You feel for smooth areas the size of your fingernail, especially where they end in crazed bits as if somebody had criss-crossed the rock with a file. There were several excrescences feeling like this. I finally chose one about a yard from where I guessed the room’s centre was.

A small fissure extended to a depth of about my hand to one side of the rock piece I’d chosen. It was as wide as a fist at the top, just big enough to ram my broken torch in and leave it sticking upright. The ladder was easy to lift but difficult to keep on its side edge. I held one end as high as I could, over the torch. I stepped aside and let go. One would be the hammer, the other the nail. It took me a dozen or so goes before the ladder’s plunging metal side hit the torch with a dull clack and I heard the chrysoberyl splinter. A few chips spattered about my cell but I could ignore those. The biggest piece was about a couple of pounds, an unimaginable quantity. I got it into my lap, gloating like a delirious miser, though God knows what I had to be pleased about.

It was a winner. Irregular as hell, the lump had nine facets with smooth silky flat surfaces. Three of them led into gritty crazed patches. I could feel the delectable richness of the beryllium salt and its violet lustre. Supposed to be unlucky for sailors, it is none the less sought after, and the clearer transparent stones are very valuable. Most come from the Urals, Ceylon and parts of Africa, with a few from Colorado. A single 10 carat natural would buy a family house. Not antique, but I was in no position to argue against free wealth.

The question was whether to wait and rest or to waggle that slab and hope for the best. But wait for what? Death in this cellar? Devvo would return my boat, simply make sure it was found tied up at Terry’s when dawn broke. Everybody would reach the same conclusion as Maslow – that Lovejoy had scarpered with a load of nicked antiques. Devvo would be thoughtful enough to leave a giveaway antique in the boat. I was done for in any case. Nobody would come after me. That was the truth.

I put the chrysoberyl piece in my pocket and, hands
reaching out in front, stumbled carefully across the uneven floor towards the wall where the slab was.

I knew that you breathe
out
when rising in deep water. How many steps had I descended? Maybe about ten flights or so, say, a dozen steps to each flight. Say about eight inches a step. That’s ten times twelve times eight over twelve, in feet. I worked it out as best my incoherent mind would allow. Eighty feet. Christ, it seemed a hell of a lot of water. I resolutely avoided working it out in fathoms. I’d learned too many grim fathomy poems in school to do that. Fathoms always sound to me distances you sink, not distances you float – and I badly wanted to float.

My heart was banging almost audibly and my palms were hot and dry. The cellar was freezing. I’d been a fool not to bring Tinker. He’d have been useless because he’s always even more scared than I am but at least he could have kept watch. I’d been thick, as usual. I peed against the wall. There was enough water out there without carrying some with me. I undid my shoes, took them and my socks off and stripped to my underpants, replacing only my jacket. The lump of chrysoberyl stayed with me. At least human beings float. I hesitated. One more worry. Is there such a thing as a non-floating man? If so, I was bound to be it. Oh God.

I felt the projecting slab. The floor beneath it seemed solid rock, like the rest. Supposing it didn’t move? Supposing it wasn’t the slab which was counterbalanced but some other thing elsewhere? Fear made me reach out and pull the slab the instant the thought came. And I was engulfed in water, roaring, howling water.

I was buffeted and knocked, pulled and swirled. Water forced into my nostrils. I hadn’t got a decent breath in. I tried to open my eyes but saw nothing. I didn’t even know
if they were open. I was spinning. Something seemed to have hold of my right arm. I screamed into rushing bubbles, threshing and kicking in the vortex, perhaps some instinct not to die from nitrogen bubbles in your blood, diver’s disease. I didn’t know which way was up. All I could hear was the terrible rushing noise, hissing like a steam train. Things seemed to keep on pulling at me, my arms and legs and shoulders. I kept trying to kick clear, as though at clutching enemies, but the water tugged a million ways at once. A minute was too much. I needed to breathe but to do so would mean drowning. I kicked madly, flailing arms and legs and doubling my body in agony. My head wanted to burst.

Something belted my neck and scraped my shoulder. I clouted it back, not feeling the pain. I felt a hard smooth surface and me sliding along it curving upwards. How did I know it was upwards? Breath came into me, pressing me out and setting me choking. I choked and retched and choked.

And floated.

It was odd, that first breath. The air was curiously warm. I wasn’t able to believe it actually was air. For a moment I wondered if this was drowning, that this stuff I was sucking in and gushing out was actually water. The fact that I was floundering dizzily beside one of the great pillars and on the sea surface, being lifted and lurched tantalizingly near to the metal stanchions, seemed somehow irrelevant for an instant. I realized I was delirious for a few seconds. Reflexes kept me surfaced. Not drowning but floundering. Great bubbles heaved and popped about me. The trouble was I couldn’t see far.

‘What the hell was that?’ a voice shouted. Devvo. I couldn’t judge the direction.

My choking stopped but I was splashing like a flounder.

‘Some boat, maybe.’ That was Devvo’s goon, breathless from lumbering the antiques.

‘What d’you expect me to do, in this frigging fog?’

‘Can it or I’ll can you.’ Devvo.

Fog?
A wave slammed me against the pillar. I was lucky not to be brained. Fog. That explained the horns from passing ships. It also explained why the sea was not running murderously high. Thick fog, low waves, they say on the coast. Noises sounded close to, thumps and a creaking, presumably Devvo’s boat loading up. I peered stupidly about, lifted and sloshed down by the swell. As if anybody could check position from distant lightships in a fog with a ten-yard visibility. My mind was too stupefied. Simply to strike out might be suicidal because I could be swimming away from the fort. Above and around a great greyness. No lights. Merely me heaving near a vast pillar in the endless bloody ocean. Distant foghorns wailed again, making me shiver more.

Driven by fear, I told myself angrily, cerebrate, you idle sod.
Which way?
I turned my head. Foghorns. Where else but further out to sea? You don’t get ships on shore. So left was land, right was east. I listened, tugged and shoved by the heaving sucking sea. An intermittent shushing sound came from the right. Rocks, the ridge protruding from the sea between the seaward pillars. I drew breath and let go, flailing towards the shushing. It was less than a length and took me years.