Haggopian and Other Stories

The Night Sea-Maid Went Down

I wrote a handful of stories while serving as a recruiting Sergeant in Leicester. “Sea-Maid” was one of them and I completed it in mid-December 1969. Derleth liked it and found it suitable for inclusion in The Caller of The Black. Like quite a few other tales of mine, it hints strongly of my fascination with the sea—and with the Cthulhu Mythos, of course.

J. H. Grier (Director)

“Queen of the Wolds Inn,”

Grier & Anderson,

Cliffside,

Seagasso

,

Bridlington,

Sunderland,

Yorks.

Co. Durham.

Nov. 29th

Dear Johnny;

By now I suppose you’ll have read my “official” report, sent off to you from this address on the fourteenth of the month, three days after the old Sea-Maid went down. How I managed that report I’ll never know—but anyway, I’ve been laid up ever since, so if you’ve been worried about me or wondering why I haven’t let on about my whereabouts till now, well, it’s not really been my fault. I just haven’t been up to doing much writing since the disaster. Haven’t been up to much of anything for that matter. But, as you’ll have seen from my report, I’ve made up my mind to quit, and suppose it’s only right I give you what I can of an explanation for my decision. After all, you’ve been paying me good money to gang-boss your rigs these last four years, and no complaints there. In fact I’ve no complaints period—nothing Seagasso could sort out at any rate—but I’m damned if I’ll sink sea-wells again. In fact I’m finished for good with all prospecting—sea, land…it makes no difference. Why!—when I think of what might have happened at any time in the last four years—

And now it has happened!

But there I go stalling again. I’ll admit right now that I’ve torn up three versions of this letter, pondering the results of them reaching you; but now, having thought it all out, frankly I don’t give a damn what you do with what I’m going to tell you. You can send an army of head-shrinkers after me if you like. One thing I’m sure of though…whatever I say you won’t suspend the North Sea operations—”The country’s economy”, and all that.

At least my story will give old Anderson a laugh; the hard, unimaginative, stoic old bastard; and no doubt about it the story I have to tell is fantastic enough. I suppose it could be argued that I was “in my cups” that night (and it’s true enough, I’d had a few) but I can hold my drink, as you well know. Still, the facts—as I know them—drunk or sober, remain simply fantastic.

Now, you’ll remember that right from the start there was something funny about the “site” off Hunterby Head. The divers had trouble; the geologists, too, with their instruments; and it was the very devil of a job to float Sea-Maid down from Sunderland and get her anchored there; but nevertheless the preliminaries were all completed by late in September. Which, where I’m concerned, was where the trouble started.

We hadn’t drilled more than six-hundred feet into the sea-bed when we brought up that first star-shaped thing. Now, Johnny, you know something?—I wouldn’t have given two damns for the thing—except I’d seen one before. Old Chalky Grey (who used to be with the “Lescoil” rig Ocean-Jem, out of Liverpool) had sent me one only a few weeks before his platform and all the crew, including Chalky himself, went down twelve miles out from Withnersea. Somehow, when I saw what came up in the big core—that same star-shape—well, I couldn’t help but think of Chalky and see some sort of nasty parallel. The one he’d sent me came up in a core, too, you see? And Ocean-Jem wasn’t the only rig lost last year in so-called “freak storms”!

But anyway, regards those star-shaped stones, something more: I wasn’t the only one to escape with my life on the night Sea-Maid went down. No, that’s not strictly true, I was the only one to live through that night—but there was a certain member of the team who saw what was coming and got out before it happened—and it was mainly because of the star-shaped things that he went!

Joe Borszowski was the man—superstitious as hell, panicky, spooked at the sight of a mist on the sea—and when he saw the star-thing…!

It happened like this:

We’d drilled that first difficult bore through some very hard stuff down to a depth of some six hundred feet when a core-sample produced the first of the stars. Now, Chalky had reckoned the one he sent me to be a fossilized star-fish of sorts from some time when the North Sea was warm, a very ancient thing; and I must admit that with its five-pointed shape and being the size of a small star-fish I believed him to be correct. Anyway, when I showed the Sea-Maid star to old Borszowski he nearly went crackers. He swore we were in for trouble and demanded we all stop drilling and head for land right away. He insisted that our location was “accursed” and generally carried on like a mad thing without attempting to offer anything like a real explanation.

Well, of course I couldn’t just leave it at that. If one of the lads was round the twist, as it were (meaning Borszowski) he could well affect the whole operation, jeopardize the whole thing, especially if his madness caught him at an important time. My immediate reaction was to want him off the rig; but the radio had been giving us a bit of bother so that I couldn’t call in Wes Atlee, the chopper pilot. Yes, I’d seriously considered having the Pole lifted off by chopper. Riggers can be damned superstitious, as you well know, and I didn’t want Joe “infecting” the others. As it turned out, that sort of action wasn’t necessary, for in no time at all old Borszowski was round apologising for his outburst and trying to show he was sorry about all the fuss he’d made. Something told me, though, that he’d been quite serious about his fears—whatever they were. And so, to put the Pole’s mind at rest (if I possibly could) I decided to have the rig’s geologist, Carson, take the star to bits and have a closer look at it and let me know what the thing actually was.

Of course, he’d tell me it was simply a fossilised star-fish—I’d report the fact to Borszowski—things would be back to normal. So naturally when Carson told me that the thing wasn’t a fossil, that he didn’t know exactly what it was, well, I kept that bit of information to myself and told Carson to do the same. I was sure that whatever the trouble had been with Borszowski it wouldn’t be helped any by telling him that the star-thing was not a perfectly ordinary, completely explicable object.

The drilling brought up two or three more of the stars down to about a thousand feet but nothing after that, so for a period I forgot all about them. As it happened I should have listened a bit more willingly to old Joe—and I would have, too, if I’d followed my intuition. You see, I’d been spooked myself right from the start. The mists were too heavy, the sea too quiet—things were altogether too queer all the way down the line. Of course, I didn’t experience any of the early troubles the divers and geologists had known—I didn’t join the rig till she was in position, ready to chew—but I was certainly in on it from then on. It had really started with the sea-phones, even before those stars came along.

Now you know I’m not knocking your ’phones, Johnny, they’ve been a damn good thing ever since Seagasso developed them, giving readings right down to the inch almost, so’s we could tell just exactly when the drill was going through into gas or oil. And they didn’t let us down this time either—we just failed to recognize or heed their warning, that’s all.

In fact there were lots of warnings, but, as I’ve said, it started out with the sea-phones. We’d put a ’phone down inside each leg of the rig, right onto the sea-bed where they sat listening to the drill as it cut its way through the rocks, picking up the echoes as the bit worked its way down and the sounds of the cutting rebounded from the strata below. And of course, everything they heard we picked up on the surface—duplicated electronically and fed out to us through our computer. Which was why we believed initially that either the computer was on the blink or one of the ’phones was dicky. You see, even when we weren’t drilling—when we were changing bits, joining up lengths or lining the bore—we were still getting readings from the computer!

Oh, the trouble was there all right, whatever it was, but it was showing up so regularly that we were fooled into believing the fault to be mechanical. On the seismograph it showed as a regular blip in an otherwise perfectly normal line; a blip that came up bang on time once every five seconds or so—blip…blip…blip—very odd! But, seeing that in every other respect the information coming out of the computer was spot on, no one worried over much about those inexplicable deviations. And, as you’ll see, it wasn’t till the very end I found a reason for them. Oh, yes, those blips were there right to the finish—but in between there came other difficulties; one of them being the trouble with the fish.

Now, if that sounds a bit funny, well, it was a funny business. The lads had rigged up a small platform, slung twenty feet or so below the main platform and about the same height above the water, and in their off-duty hours when they weren’t resting or knocking back a pint in the mess, you could usually see one or two of them down there fishing. First time we found anything odd in the habits of the fish around the rig was one morning when Nick Adams hooked a beauty. All of three feet long, the fish was, wriggling and yellow in the cold November sunlight. Nick just about had the fish docked when the hook came out of its mouth so that it fell among some support-girders down near where leg number four was being washed by a slight swell. It just lay there, flopping about a bit, writhing around in the girders. Nick scrambled down after it with a rope round his waist while his brother Dave hung on to the other end. And what do you think?—when he got down to it, damned if the fish didn’t go for him! It actually made to bite him, flopping after him on the girders and snapping its jaws until he had to yell for Dave to haul him up. Later he told us about it—how the damned thing hadn’t even tried to get back into the sea, seeming more interested in setting its teeth in him than preserving its own life! Now, you’d expect that sort of reaction from a great eel, Johnny, wouldn’t you?—but hardly from a cod—not from a North-Sea cod!

From then on Spelmann, the diver, couldn’t go down—not wouldn’t mind you, couldn’t—the fish simply would not let him! They’d chew on his suit, his air-hose—he got so frightened of them he became literally useless to us. I can’t see as I blame him though, especially when I think of what later happened to Davies.

But of course, before Davies’ accident, there was that further trouble with Borszowski. It was in the sixth week, when we were expecting to break through at any time, that Joe failed to come back off shore-leave. Instead he sent me a long, rambling letter—a supposedly “explanatory” letter—and to be truthful, when I read it I figured we were better off without him.

The man had quite obviously been cracking up for a long time. He went on about monsters (yes, monsters!), sleeping in great caverns underground and especially under the seas, waiting for a chance to take over the surface world. He said that those stone, star-shaped things were seals or barriers that kept these beings (“gods”, he called them) imprisoned; that these gods could control the weather to a degree; that they were even capable of influencing the actions of lesser creatures—such as fish, or, occasionally, men—and that he believed one of them must he lying there, locked in the ground beneath the sea, pretty close to where we were drilling. He was afraid we were “going to set it loose”! The only thing that had stopped him pressing the matter earlier (when he’d carried on so about that first star-thing), was that then, as now, he believed we’d all think he was mad! Finally, though, and particularly since the trouble with the fish, he had had to warn me. As he put it: “If anything should happen, I would never be able to forgive myself if I had not at least tried.”

Well, as I’ve said, Borszowski’s letter was rambling and disjointed—but he’d written it in a rather convincing manner, hardly what you’d expect from a real madman. He quoted references from the Holy Bible (particularly Exodus 20:4) and emphasized again his belief that the star-shaped things were nothing more or less than prehistoric pentacles (pentagrams?), laid down by some great race of alien scientists many millions of years ago. He reminded me of the heavy, unusual mists we’d had and of the queer way the cod had gone for Nick Adams. He even brought up again the question of the dicky sea-phones and computer—making, in toto, an altogether disturbing assessment of Sea-Maid’s late history as applicable to his own odd fancies.

I did some checking on Joe’s background that same afternoon, discovering that he’d travelled far in his earlier years and had also been a bit of a scholar in his time. Too, it had been noticed on occasion—whenever the mists were heavier than usual—that he crossed himself with a certain sign over his left breast. A number of the lads had seen him do it and they all told the same tale of that sign; it was pointed with one point straight up, two down and wide, two more still lower and closer together; yes, his sign was a five-pointed star!

In fact, Borszowski’s letter so disturbed me I was still thinking about it that evening after we’d shut down for the day. That was why I was out on the main platform having a quiet pipeful—I can concentrate, you know, with a bit of ’baccy. Dusk was only a few minutes away when the accident happened.

Davies, the steel-rigger, was up tightening a few loosened nuts near the top of the rig. Don’t ask me where the mist came from, I wouldn’t know, but suddenly it was there; swimming up from the sea, a thick, grey blanket that cut visibility down to no more than a few feet. I’d just shouted up to Davies that he better pack it in for the night when I heard his yell and saw his lantern come blazing down out of the greyness. The light disappeared through an open hatch and a second later Davies followed it. He went straight through the hatchway, missing the sides by inches, and then there came the splashes as first the lantern, then the man, hit the sea. In two shakes of a dog’s tail Davies was splashing about down there in the mist and yelling fit to ruin his lungs—proving to me and the others who’d rushed from the mess at my call that his fall had done him little harm. We lowered a raft immediately, getting two of the men down to the water in less than a minute, and no one gave it a second thought that Davies wouldn’t be picked up. He was, after all, an excellent swimmer. In fact the lads on the raft thought the whole episode was a big laugh—that is, until Davies started to scream.

I mean, there are screams and there are screams, Johnny! Davies wasn’t drowning—he wasn’t making noises like a drowning man! He wasn’t picked up, either.

No less quickly than it had settled, the mist lifted, so that by the time the raft touched water visibility was normal for a November evening—but there was no sign of the rigger. There was something, though, for the whole surface of the sea was silver with fish; big and little, of almost every indigenous species you could imagine; and the way they were acting, apparently trying to throw themselves aboard the raft, I had the lads haul themselves and the raft back up to the platform as soon as it became evident that Davies was gone for good. Johnny!—I swear I’ll never eat fish again.

That night I didn’t sleep very well at all. Now you know I’m not being callous. I mean, aboard an ocean-going rig after a hard day’s work, no matter what has happened during the day, a man usually manages to sleep. Yet that night I just couldn’t drop off. I kept going over in my mind all the…well, the things. The occurrences, the happenings on the old Sea-Maid; the trouble with the instruments; Borszowski’s letter; and finally, of course, the queer way we lost Davies—until I thought my head must burst with the burden of wild notions and imaginings going around and around inside it.

Next afternoon the chopper came in (with Wes Atlee complaining about having had to make two runs in two days), and delivered all the booze and goodies for the party the next day or whenever. As you know, we always have a blast when we strike it rich—and this time we figured we were going to. We’d been out of booze a few days by that time (bad weather had stopped Wes from bringing in anything heavier than mail) and so I was running pretty high and dry. Well, you know me, Johnny. I got in the back of the mess with all those bottles and cracked a few. I could see the gear turning from the window, and, over the edge of the platform, the sea all grey and eerie looking, and somehow the idea of getting a load of drink inside me seemed a good one.

I’d been in there topping-up for over an hour when Jeffries, my 21C, got through to me on the ’phone. He was in the instrument-cabin and said he reckoned the drill would go through to pay-dirt within a few minutes. He sounded worried, though, sort of shaky, and when I asked him why this was he didn’t rightly seem able to answer—mumbled something about the seismograph mapping those strange blips again; as regular as ever but somehow stronger, closer…

About that time I first noticed the mist swirling up from the sea, a real pea-souper, billowing in to smother the rig and turn the men on the platform to grey ghosts. It muffled the sound of the gear, too, altering the metallic clank and rattle of pulleys and chains to distant, dull noises such as I might have expected to hear from the rig if I’d been in a suit deep down under the sea.

It was warm enough in the back room of the mess there, yet unaccountably I found myself shivering as I looked out over the rig and listened to the ghostly sounds of the shrouded men and machinery.

That was when the wind came up. First the mist, then the wind—but I’d never before seen a mist that a good strong wind couldn’t blow away! Oh, I’ve seen freak storms before, Johnny, but believe me this was the freak storm! She came up out of nowhere—not breaking the blanket of grey but driving it round and round like a great mad ghost—blasting the already choppy sea against the old Sea-Maid’s supporting legs, flinging up spray to the platform’s guard-rails and generally (from what I could see from the window) creating havoc. I’d no sooner recovered from my initial amazement when the ’phone rang again. I picked up the receiver to hear Jimmy Jeffries’ somewhat distorted yell of triumph coming over the wires:

“We’re through, Pongo!” he yelled. “We’re through and there’s juice on the way up the bore right now!” Then his voice took the shakes again, turning in tone from wild excitement to terror in a second, as the whole rig wobbled on her four great legs. “Holy Heaven!—what…?” the words crackled into my ear. “What was that, Pongo? The rig…wait…” I heard the clatter as the ‘phone at the other end banged down, but a moment later Jimmy was back. “It’s not the rig—the legs are steady as rocks—it’s the whole sea-bed! Pongo, what’s going on. Holy Heaven—!”

This time the ’phone went completely dead as the rig moved again, jerking up and down three or four times and shaking everything loose inside the mess store-room. I still held on to the instrument, though, and just for a second or two it came back to life. Jimmy was screaming incoherently into the other end. I remember then that I yelled for him to get into a life-jacket, that there was something terribly wrong and we were in for big trouble, but I’ll never know if he heard me. The rig rocked again, throwing me down on the floor-boards among the debris of bottles, crates, cans and packets; and there, skidding wildly about the tilting floor, I collided with a life-jacket. God only knows what the thing was doing there in the store-room; they were normally kept in the equipment shed and only taken out following storm-warnings (which, it goes without saying, we hadn’t had) but somehow I managed to struggle into it and make my way into the mess proper before the next upheaval.

By that time, over the roar of the wind and waves outside (the broken crests of the waves were actually slapping against the outer walls of the mess by then) I could hear a whipping of free-running pulleys and a high-pitched screaming of revving, uncontrolled gears—and there was another sort of screaming….

In a blind panic I was crashing my way through the tumble of tables and chairs in the mess towards the door leading out onto the platform when the greatest shock so far tilted the floor to what must have been thirty degrees and saved me my efforts. In a moment—as I flew against the door, bursting it open and floundering out into the storm—I knew for sure that Sea-Maid was going down. Before, it had only been a possibility; a mad, improbable possibility; but now—now I knew for sure. Half stunned from my collision with the door I was thrown roughly against the platform rails, to cling there for dear life in the howling, tearing wind and chill, rushing mist and spray.

And that was when I saw it.

I saw it—and in my utter disbelief—in one crazy moment of understanding—I relaxed my hold on the rails and slid under them into the throat of that banshee, demon storm that howled and tore at the trembling girders of the old Sea-Maid.

Even as I fell, a colossal wave smashed into the rig, breaking two of the legs as though they were nothing stronger than match-sticks, and the next instant I was in the sea, picked up and swept away on the great crest of that same wave. Even in the dizzy, sickening rush as the great wave hurled me aloft, I tried to spot Sea-Maid in the maelstrom of wind, mist and ocean. It was futile, and I gave it up in order to put all effort to my own battle for survival.

I don’t remember much after that—at least, not until I was picked up, and even that’s not too clear. I do remember, though, while fighting the icy water, a dreadful fear of being eaten alive by fish; but so far as I know there were none about. I remember, too, being hauled aboard the life-boat from the mainland in a sea that was flat as a pancake and calm as a mill-pond.

The next really lucid moment came when I woke up to find myself between clean sheets in a Bridlington hospital.

But there, I’ve held off from telling the important part—and for the same reason Joe Borszowski held off: I don’t want to be thought a madman. Well, I’m not mad, Johnny, but I don’t suppose for a single moment that you’ll take my story seriously—nor, for that matter, will Seagasso suspend any of its North-Sea commitments—but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I tried to warn you.

Now I ask you to remember what Borszowski said about great, alien beings lying asleep and imprisoned beneath the bed of the sea; “gods” capable of controlling the actions of lesser creatures, capable of bending the very weather to their wills—and then explain the sight I saw before I found myself floundering in that mad ocean as the old Sea-Maid went down.

It was simply a gusher, Johnny, a gusher—but one such as I’d never seen before in my whole life and hope never to have to see again. For instead of reaching to the heavens in one solid black column—it pulsed upwards, pumping up in short, strong jets at a rate of about one spurt in every five seconds—and it wasn’t oil, Johnny—oh God!—it wasn’t oil! Booze or none I swear I wasn’t drunk; not so drunk as to make me colour-blind, at any rate!

Like I said, old Borszowski was right, he must have been right. There was one of those great god-creatures down there, and our drill had chopped right into the thing!

Whatever it was it had blood pretty much like ours—good and thick and red—and a great heart strong enough to pump that blood up the bore-hole right to the surface!

Think of it, that monstrous heart beating down there in the rocks beneath the sea! How could we have guessed that right from the beginning our instruments had been working at maximum efficiency—that those odd, regular blips recorded on the seismograph had been nothing more than the beating of a great submarine heart?

All of which explains, I hope, my resignation.

Bernard “Pongo” Jordan,

Bridlington,

Yorks.