The Ebb Tide (6 page)

The opposite shore seemed uncannily near, although it must have been four miles away. We could see the scattered, late-night lights of Silverdale across what was now a diminishing stretch of moonlit water, and farther along the lights of Poulton-le-Sands and perhaps Heysham in the dim distance. There was considerable virtue in the clear, illuminated night, but an equal amount of danger, and so I was relieved when the track turned inward across a last stretch of salt marsh and away from the Bay, growing slightly more solid as the ground rose. We quickened our pace, climbing a small, steep rise, hidden by a sea wood now from the watching eyes of anyone out and about on the Bay.

Soon we rounded a curve in the track, and there in front of us stood Uncle Fred’s cottage, which he called
Flotsam
. It was very whimsical, built of a marvelous array of cast off materials that Fred had salvaged from the sands or had purchased from the seaside residents of that long reach of treacherous coastline that stretches from Morecambe Bay up to St. Bees, where many a ship beating up into the Irish Channel in a storm has found itself broken on a lee shore. Looking out over the Bay was a ship’s quarter-gallery, with high windows allowing views both north and south. In the moonlight the gallery appeared to be perfectly enormous, a remnant of an old First Rate ship, perhaps, and it made the cottage look elegant despite the whole thing being cobbled together, just as its name implied. The cottage climbed the hill, so to speak, most of it built of heavy timbers and deck planks and with sections of masts and spars as corner posts and lintels. On the windward side it was shingled with a hodgepodge of sheet copper torn from ships’ bottoms. It was a snug residence, with its copper-sheathed back turned toward the open ocean, and the sight was something more than attractive. There was a light burning beyond the gallery window, illuminating a long table already set for visitors. Someone, I could see, sat in a chair at the table—perhaps Uncle Fred, if he were a small man.

What amounted to something between a widow’s walk and a crow’s nest stood atop the uppermost room, giving Fred a view of the sands from on high. I noticed a movement there, someone waving in our direction and then disappearing, and the door at the side of the gallery was swinging open when we reined up in the yard. I was fabulously hungry, and weary of the sea wind and anxious to get out of it, if only for a brief time. Uncle Fred stepped out with what turned out to be a boy following along behind him.

“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 were 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.