The Ebb Tide

CHAPTER 8 Smothercated

The morning was peacefully silent but for the calling of gulls, the cool spring sun filtered through the leaves of the tree limbs overhead, and Morecambe Bay lay as placid as a lake behind us, the tidewaters a thing of memory. It was as if we had stepped out of the tumult of a noisy ball into the silent peace of a garden.

“Stay well clear of the pool,” I said, looking down at the swampy ground beneath us. The wagon settled more deeply into the mire even as we watched, as if the sands of the Bay and its marshy environs were determined to consume us. Finn leapt clear, landing on his feet, and I followed, coming down on solid ground with an ankle-numbing force.

“Look, sir! She’s in a hurry now!” Finn said, pointing at the forward part of the wagon, which slipped a couple of inches deeper again, the pool emitting a soft, deadly, well-fed sigh. The canted-down, forward deck of the wagon was buried, sandy mud oozing up over the bench, the diving chamber leaning away from the crane mast.

“If we make the grappling hook and line fast around a tree,” I said, “we might still haul the wagon out with the block and tackle and save the diving chamber and the box.”

“I’ll try for the hook,” Finn said gamely, and he paced backwards several yards and set out as if to make a rash leap onto the bed. I stopped him in mid-stride. Leaping down from a height was one thing, but leaping upward entirely another.

“Perhaps a tree limb,” I said, and we looked above us now. Our luck held fair, for some ten feet overhead a leafy limb reached out over the wagon.

“Give me a heft, sir,” Finn said, and in an instant he was up and standing on my shoulders. He leapt, caught a lower limb, and scampered into the tree like a forest creature. I stepped back to watch him. Getting a line on the wagon would be easy enough, if we were quick about it, although hauling it out again might want the team of horses, if in fact it could be hauled out.

There was abruptly the sound of voices from somewhere very near, and in my current state of mind I thought that it was St. Ives, come to fetch us. But then I knew that it wasn’t his voice, and I turned to see two men appearing from along a trail that followed the edge of the Bay — the two men I had first seen in Lambert Court, playing the part of workmen. The tall one carried his rifle; the short, simian-looking man who had struck Merton had only his ugly countenance to recommend him. They seemed as astonished to see me as I was to see them, but it was only in that regard that we were equal, for there were two of them and one of me, and there was the rifle to consider. A smile flickered across the face of the tall man, if indeed you could call it a smile, as he glanced from me to the wagon. He slowly raised the rifle and pointed it at me. I assumed that he meant to shoot me, and so I stood perfectly still, hoping that Finn was doing the same in the tree.

“What have we here, Spanker?” the tall man said.

“A hideous devil, I do believe,” Spanker said. “Pity its poor mother.”

“I say that if it moves it’s a corpse, but if it stays still it might be of some small value to men like us.”

“It’s brought us the undersea chamber,” the man Spanker said. “Isn’t it a good ’un, returning the doctor’s stolen property?”

“A peach. Sit down and have a rest, mate,” the tall one said to me, “there by that tree. Spanker, twist his head for him if he gets fancy. I’ll find a piece of rope to secure that wagon, and then we’ll see what his friends think he’s worth — a couple of quid and the odd pence, I should think.”

I sat down as requested, not anxious to have my head twisted, and watched the tall man head off through the close trees. A horse whinnied in that direction, and I saw that a canvas tent and bits and pieces of gear stood some distance beyond our clearing, lost in the woods unless you knew where to look. A sort of dogcart or shay was tethered nearby them. It was a neatly hidden bivouac, close enough to the road so that they must have seen and heard us early this morning when we were rattling along toward Grange-over-Sands in our wagon. Frosticos, of course, had posted them there. How they communicated with the doctor, I couldn’t say, but I recalled what St. Ives had speculated about underground waters and passages inland, and it would seem no great feat for Frosticos to surface now and then a mile or so north in the lower reaches of the River Kent, where it broadened out and entered the Bay.

I stole a casual glance into the treetops, and spotted Finn straight off, perched over the wagon among the leaves. He was anxious to be up to something, and was gesturing furiously. He pointed at me, put his hands together as if praying, and pretended to dive headfirst from his limb. I had no idea what he meant, but then he repeated the gesture, pointing determinedly at me again, and I understood: he wanted me to do the plunging. Apparently he had gone mad.

The tall man had by now reached the clearing in the woods, and would doubtless soon return. Spanker was paring his fingernails with a murderous-looking knife. He gave me a malicious grin, and I grinned back, the seconds passing quickly. Trust the boy, my misgiving mind told me, and before it could tell me anything different, I leapt forward from where I sat and threw myself bodily into the quicksand, trying to scoop my way to the wagon, but bogging down almost at once, too far from solid ground, however, to be easily retrieved.

Spanker stared at me with a look of surprised wonder on his face, but that changed to something else again when he saw Finn drop out of the tree and onto the bed of the wagon, at which moment he began to shout incoherently for his companion. I held very still, feeling myself sinking, fighting the urge to kick my feet and fully expecting to be shot. Within seconds Finn had slipped the catch on the windlass and was hauling out line, swinging the grappling hook and letting it fly out toward me over a distance of perhaps ten feet. I latched onto it, and straightaway I heard the windlass turning and began towing forward across the surface of the muck. I looked back, and saw that the tall man had returned, and that he held a coil of rope. His rifle, however, stood against the tree, and the smile still twisted his mouth.

We had no place to go. He saw that. We were making good our escape, but onto a variety of sinking ship. I reached the wagon and hefted myself over the side, the quicksand holding the wagon steady in its grip, although it was apparently sliding downward at a steeper and steeper angle, the diving chamber swinging out farther on its tether, dangling a mere foot above the surface now. In a moment it would simply be out of reach.

“The chamber,” I said to Finn in a low voice, and he caught my meaning directly. Without a pause I reached far out and managed to open the hatch, drawing the chamber closer to us. I shoveled Finn through the door, and than climbed in myself, throwing out the broken remains of the strongbox before locking us in. I picked up the odd, ovoid device that Parson Grimstead had recovered from his manure pile and set it carefully on the seat. It was the size of a large loaf of bread, built of several riveted metals, brass and copper among them. Despite its having remained dry in the rubber-sealed strongbox, the brass and copper were discolored with faint lines of verdigris. One of the ends was contrived of a crystalline substance, separated from the metals by a band of ebony-like wood. The crystal was translucent, but was cloudy with striations, so that it obscured whatever lay beneath it.

“May I take a squint at it, sir?” Finn asked, and I could see no reason to deny him. We certainly had nothing better to do with our time. He picked it up, holding it by the ends and peering into the crystal. Right then the wagon gave another downward jolt. There was the sound of laughter from our two friends on shore, and the tall one waved at us in a cheerful, bon voyage sort of way. Then they set about getting a line out to us.

“It’s warm-like,” Finn said. “Like an egg under a hen. I wonder what it does.”

It did feel curiously warm, although it hadn’t a moment ago, and either the sun was shining on it so as to make the crystal glow faintly, or else it was glowing of its own accord. Certainly we had done nothing to it aside from picking it up. It was decidedly close in the chamber, and so I turned the valve to let in air, and there was a satisfying blast, although nothing like its original pressure. Soon we would have to do something decisive or else give ourselves up. Either way, it was better to do so before the chamber sank into the sands than after.

And with that thought I had a look at the controls of the chamber, wishing I had paid more attention earlier. Still and all, St. Ives had figured them out, and I supposed I could do the same to some useful extent. Straight off I found the lever that emptied the ballast tanks, and I resolutely drained them, giving our friends on shore a moment of pause. We would at least ride higher in the quicksand, I thought.

Then another thought came to me: if the line affixing the chamber to the windlass were released, we might still float. Even if the wagon sank to the very bottom of the swamp, it wouldn’t drag us down with it. What had St. Ives said? — two hundred feet of line? As I saw it, the wagon was our anchor….

“I’m going to open the hatch,” I said. “Can you pop out and release the stop on the windlass line so that the chamber might float?”

“Done,” Finn said, laying the device on the seat. I threw the hatch open and in a trice he was out and had released the line. I was surprised by the sudden plummet of the craft — a plummet of perhaps six inches — onto the surface of the pool. Finn clambered back into the chamber and shut the door behind him, picking up the device and holding it again, as if he meant to keep it safe. I immediately doubted myself, full of the unsettling notion that we were sinking deeper into the ooze now, that the broad expanse of the wagon had in fact been our temporary security.

On shore, the tall man gave us a discerning look, but again seemed to find our activities irrelevant, as perhaps they were. They had their own line run out and around the trunk of the tree now, and Spanker, who had the build of a Navy topman, was quickly aloft. Within moments he dropped heavily to the deck, ignoring us utterly until he had secured the line to the base of the crane mast. Then he pitched the grappling hook shoreward, and the tall man gave it a turn about the tree, and Spanker moved across to the windlass, where he took the slack out of the rope. He made an effort to turn it farther, to winch the wagon up out of the quicksand, but to little avail. They had a double line on it now, though. No doubt to their mind, the chamber was safe enough. Spanker stepped across the deck toward us. He bent down and made a series of loathsome faces before silently acting out the antics of a man in the throes of suffocation, after which he shook his head sadly, winked at us, and disappeared back up into the tree.

“We’re in the hopper,” Finn said, “and no doubt about it. But my money’s on the Professor and old Mr. Merton. They’ll be along directly.”

“Surely they will,” I said.

“Look at this, sir.” Finn said, nodding at the device now. The crystal had a more pronounced glow, from deep within, and it was blood-warm to the touch. “I believe it’s woke up,” Finn said. “What does it do, do you suppose?”

The term woke up alarmed me. “Do?” I asked. “I’m afraid I can’t say. Professor St. Ives seems to believe that it was connected with the odd behavior of cattle, but that tells us little.”

“Cattle, is it?” He gave me a skeptical look.

There was a decisive sucking noise now, directly below us, and the chamber shuddered and shifted. We held very still. I was certain now that releasing the line had murdered us, that we were sinking, and that someone — Frosticos or St. Ives — would fish the chamber out of the quicksand with two corpses inside.

But we didn’t sink. We shifted and shuddered and sat still again. Then we shuddered, as if the wind were blowing, and kept on shuddering. The two on shore were eating a jolly breakfast now, with a pot of tea and two cups — all very elegant, and meant, no doubt, simply to torment us. Spanker held up a great chunk of bread and jam, raised it in a greedy salute, and devoured it. But the tall one noticed the antics of the chamber, and he set down his teacup and gave us a hard look, as if we were up to something.

And apparently we were, quite literally, for instead of sinking, we seemed to be rising. “We’re off,” Finn said, matter-of-factly. “It’s the device, sure as you’re born. Same as one of those hot air balloons, maybe.”

That made no sense at all to me. How could it be the device? Hot air balloons? We had seemed to become one. We rose slowly, looking slightly downward onto the two on shore now. The tall man shouted something to Spanker, who climbed hurriedly into the tree, moving out onto his limb just after we had drifted past it. He glanced up at us, and he wasn’t grimacing and gesturing now, but was apparently mystified and suspicious. He stepped straight off the limb and latched onto the rope, which had begun to unreel itself like a charmed serpent. The chamber rocked with his weight, and for a moment was actually descending, putting an end to our capers. Our descent quickly slowed, and for a moment we rocked lazily in stasis. And then once again we were off, as Finn had put it, with Spanker still dangling tenaciously below us, kicking and tugging.

“He’s off his chump,” Finn said. “Why did he go for the rope when there’s a winch in easy reach?”

“He doesn’t have much of a chump to start with,” I said.

The craft swung and shook as Spanker struggled futilely to accomplish what gravity had failed to accomplish. And then, perhaps realizing that he was dangerously high above the deck of the wagon and that we were drifting to leeward despite the sea anchor, he let go, heaving himself toward the deck of the wagon below, the chamber canting sideways with the force of it. We looked down in time to see him turn in the air, head downward and still a couple of narrow feet from the wagon when he smashed head-foremost into the quicksand with enough force to bury him waist deep, one arm trapped by his side and his legs waving, as in that painting of the fall of Icarus. His free arm and legs worked furiously, driving him downward. The tall man tore at the knotted rope (which, fittingly, Spanker had himself knotted) but he was taking far too long about it. The wind drifted us north, so that we got a better view of the scene below, and what we saw was the tall man pointlessly casting the rope at his erstwhile companion’s ankles in the moment that he slipped beneath the sands and disappeared.

It was in fact a ghastly sight, despite Spanker’s criminal tendencies, and the odd notion came into my mind that I wished I hadn’t known the man’s name. Perhaps it’s not odd. I tried to think of something sufficiently philosophical to say to Finn, but the boy was already nodding his head in contemplation. “In Duffy’s Circus,” he told me, “old Samson the elephant sat down on his trainer, something like a tea cosy over the teapot, if you see what I mean. He was a terrible man named Walsh, and his head went straight up the hiatus. The doctor told us that Samson smothercated him dead.”

I wondered in that moment, from my elevated per-spective, how I had ever come to doubt the boy. My doubts had all been speculative. His actions had clearly professed his innocence and loyalty. A high regard for one’s powers of logic, I told myself, can smothercate a man.

“Take a look down the way, sir,” Finn said now, pointing out toward the Bay.

I took a look. It was St. Ives and Fred Merton, perhaps a quarter mile down toward Grange-over-Sands, coming along the trail by the shore. Merton carried a rifle. They had seen us right enough, floating there high above the treetops, and they stood for a moment marveling at the sight. As for us, we could see far out into the broad Atlantic, the dark line westward being the shore of Ireland, I believe, and the Isle of Man sitting in the sea in between. I opened the hatch, leaning out into the giddy breeze, and pointed downward, toward where the tall man stood at the edge of the pool in dazed contemplation. He apparently saw the signal himself, deduced that reinforcements had arrived, and set out at a dead run toward his camp, carrying his rifle.

St. Ives and Merton were wary, of course, and came along much more slowly. By the time they reached the camp our assailant had fled in his shay, leaving his accoutrements behind. From our height we could see him scouring along the road in the distance, but there was nothing at all to do about it, which was a dirty shame. Hasbro had been shot twice in the space of a few days by the same man, a man who had no motive aside from mere sport, which says something about human degradation that I’d rather not soil these pages speculating upon. Justice, I’m afraid, sometimes is not met out on Earth, or at least not that we know of. But then I’m reminded of Spanker, burrowing his way to Hell, and I find that there’s little satisfaction in that sort of justice anyway.

We descended from our height after a good deal of shouted communication with St. Ives. The device — an anti-gravity mechanism that reacted quite simply to heat — bodily heat and radiant sunlight in our case — gradually lost its powers when Finn was induced simply to set it down onto the deck of the chamber. Later St. Ives speculated that the naturally high degree of heat in the manure heap on Parson Grimstead’s property had been sufficient to elevate the immediately surrounding cattle. Our descent was every bit as graceful as our ascent, although far more disappointing, for I rather enjoyed the view.

As for Dr. Frosticos, he and his submarine didn’t reappear, and so we had no choice but to keep his diving chamber until he called for it. We took a certain joy in the fact that he had failed in all his endeavors, and that in his last, mad rush in the submarine he had passed out of our lives again, at least for a time.