The Ebb Tide (7 page)

“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 accounted 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.

“Can you discern what he means to do?” St. Ives asked, concentrating on his task.

“No. It’s difficult to tell how far off…. Wait, I believe he’s coming directly toward us now, moving slowly. Perhaps he’s just seen us.”

“We’ve got it!” St. Ives said, glancing through the port at the approaching submarine. He gave the grapple a small tug to assure that it was secure, and then tugged in earnest, and we teetered forward for one breathtaking, eye-shutting moment before we settled back onto our pins. The box slid neatly off the bed of the wagon in a silty cloud and settled on the sea floor, dozens of feather worms snatching themselves into their holes. St. Ives released the grapple, retracted the mechanical arm firmly against the hull of our craft, and began to propel the chamber a few paces off. “We’ll leave the rest up to our friends topside,” he said with satisfaction.

“Gladly,” I said, glancing out through the port at the submarine, suspended there at a distance of perhaps 50 yards, although it was difficult to tell in the darkness. Frosticos seemed to be doing us the favor of casting a helpful light on our work.

“Keep an eye on that box, Jack,” St. Ives said, looking steadily at his chronometer. “We should see Merton’s hand at play right about…now.” All was still for a moment, and then the box gave a jerk and began hopping and scooting along the floor of the sea, sand and sea bottom debris rising in a cloud. St. Ives nodded agreeably at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back at him, our notable success having swept the fears out of my mind like yesterday’s cobweb. All this time, of course, I had been doing my duty with the oxygen lever, and I noted cheerily that the air still whooshed briskly through the pipes. Suffocation, then, was still some distance off. We began our creeping, homeward progress, our real work finished. We simply had to wait our turn to be reeled in. St. Ives meant to be as directly under the crane as ever we could be, so that our ascent was unimpeded by anything but a floating chair or two.

I waved victoriously at the submarine, imagining happily that the good doctor’s head was set to explode from frustration. The craft had by then begun to move away, and was circling around as if turning tail for Carnforth in defeat. “He’s showing us his back, the dog,” I said to St. Ives. “Slinking away.” But the submarine continued to turn in a close circle, not slinking away at all, and soon the light was aimed dead at us, its watery glow obscuring the shadow of the ship behind it. Abruptly it launched itself forward, flying at us in an increasing rush.

Chapter 7
The Turning of the Tide

I gasped out a warning to St. Ives, who shouted, “Hold on!” at that same moment. He was bent over the controls, high-stepping our awkward craft across the sea floor now, attempting to maneuver us out of the way of the approaching submarine, which veered to remain on course. I held on with an iron grip, watching our doom hurtle toward us. The submarine easily compensated for our creaking, evasive ploys, and within moments we were blinded by the intensity of its light, and we both threw ourselves to the deck, hands over our heads, as if we could somehow protect ourselves.

The chamber toppled backward, and we were thrown together in a heap. I banged my elbow into something hard, but scarcely felt it, fully expecting the rush of cold water, the desperate, futile flight through the hatch. But there was no rush of water, and I had no sensation of our craft having been struck by anything. The light from the submarine was gone. The submarine had passed over us, and we found ourselves dragged along backward at what seemed to be a prodigious rate. It was our friends above, hauling us out bodily. We were “packing it in” as Fred had put it, right on time, and there was no dignity involved in the packing. I gripped the stanchions that supported the circular seat, and looked up through the port at the dark ceiling of our grotto, and once again I saw the flotsam held in stasis against the sands.

Then the blinding light again, and the submarine swept past, inches overhead, its dark shape passing like a great whale, and I thanked my stars that we were tipped flat, for the submarine evidently didn’t dare to swim any closer to the sea floor. But my musings were shattered by a heavy jolt, and now out of the port I saw that we had bulled our way straight into the coach and four. A rain of human bones tumbled out through the window. Our retracted arm hooked into the bottom of a horse’s skull, which sailed along with us like a misplaced figurehead before another jolt knocked it free. Then suddenly we were ascending smoothly, and we hauled ourselves gratefully onto the seats again, taking stock of bruises and abrasions.

We passed through the stasis layer into the murk of the sands, St. Ives letting out ballast to aid our ascent, and I reminded myself not to be quite so prematurely satisfied in the future, gloating over a victory before the enemy had left the field. Now we were clear, though. He could hardly follow us into the pool of quicksand. “Nothing broken?” I asked St. Ives.

“My chronometer, I’m afraid.” He held up the shattered timepiece. “I’d rather break an arm, or very nearly. But not a bad bill to pay, all in all.”

We continued to ascend in silence for another minute or two, but then abruptly stopped.

“Perhaps a fouled line,” St. Ives said. “They’ll be at it again directly.”

But the minutes passed, and still we sat there, my mind turning in the silence. It came to me that I should make a clean breast of my long-held suspicions while I had a quiet moment. “I’m a little worried about an element of this entire business,” I said.

“Out with it, then.”

“We’ve had some good luck,” I told him. “And it seems we’ve been clever. But consider this: what if Frosticos knew what we were about, and I mean from the beginning. That business at Merton’s—knocking poor Merton on the head like that—what if it was meant to move us to action? For my money Frosticos wasn’t foxed by the false map for more than a moment. He
knew
we had the original, and he intended for us to lead him to the box. He provided us the means by lending us this diving chamber. We were at the mercy of the tides once we arrived here at the Bay, and it was no great feat for him to lurk about the subterranean reaches watching for us when the time was right. Then he played a helpful light on our endeavors until we had succeeded, at which point he tried to murder us in cold blood, having done with us.”

St. Ives sat thinking, but there was only one element of the theory that required any thinking. He reached up and gave us another gasp of air. “You say he wasn’t foxed by the map,” he said carefully. “You’re suggesting…”

“I don’t mean to
suggest
anything,” I said, looking out into the by now thick sands, “only that we might have been played like fiddles.”

“I sense that you don’t want to cast any blame on Finn Conrad, but he might easily be the necessary link in the chain? His appearance outside Merton’s was certainly convenient.”

“It was,” I said, “although it’s as easily coincidental. Perhaps Merton’s forgery was simply no good, and Frosticos saw through it.”

“You’ve seen his handiwork,” St. Ives said.

“Yes, but suppose Frosticos had come here straightaway by some subterranean route and had already found the map useless before our arrival, thereby suspecting it to be a forgery and lying in wait for us. When he saw us in our lighted chamber meddling on the sea floor…” I shrugged and gave us more air.

“But we’ve got to consider that Finn was our means of finding the boatyard and discovering this chamber. We were forced to flee in it in order to avoid drowning or being shot by men who seemed to have known we would come along when we did.”

“One other thing,” I said. “You were careful to slip the true map into your coat pocket, but Merton wasn’t half so careful, especially with his insanely detailed letter, which he placed directly into Finn’s hands before sending him post haste to the Bay.”

“I find the idea distressing,” St. Ives said wearily. “I don’t say that I find it unlikely, just distressing.”