Ingram felt an arm lock around his neck and the thumb of the other hand groping for his eyes. He ducked his face down in Bellew’s throat and brought his right hand up, grinding the heel of it as he pushed upward, and felt the nose flatten with the tearing of cartilage. Bellew released his neck, pushed him upward, and then kicked out with both feet against his chest. He came up and back, felt his head strike the mizzen boom, and sagged to his knees. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw Rae emerging from the hatch with the shotgun barrels in her hand, raising them to swing.
Bellew whirled as lightly as a cat, caught her arm, and yanked. She came catapulting up on deck. Bellew plucked the gun barrels from her, threw them outward into the sea, and cuffed her backward across the deckhouse in three smooth and almost simultaneous blurs of motion. Ingram was on his feet again. Bellew turned back to him, grinning and hideous with blood running down his face and onto his chest from the pulpy ruin of his nose. Ingram tried to swing, and then something like the popping of a flash bulb went off inside his head and he was on the bottom of the cockpit.
He wasn’t completely out, but dazed and too sick and too weak to get up. He tried. He pushed upward with his arms, felt Saracen roll all the way over and spin end-for-end, and collapsed again. He was under the edge of the wheel, and inches in front of his face two feet in white canvas shoes were bound to the bottom of the binnacle with a section of old heaving line. He was absorbing and cataloguing this phenomenon with the bemused wonder of a baby discovering its navel, and only beginning to fit it back into its position in a framework of time and place where everything had blown up and hadn’t yet finished settling, when somewhere far off he heard the scream begin. Then the feet moved upward—quite casually, it seemed to him—and the heaving line parted as if it were rotten string.
His mind was clear now, but he still couldn’t get up. He fell back on his side and was looking up past the wheel and the binnacle. Bellew, the gory face split in its wolfish grin, was leaning over Warriner. And Warriner was sitting up, cringing backward, still screaming.
“No, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, no! No—no—!”
Ingram vomited. He could feel the warmth of it on his hands, and the deck was slick with it as he tried again to push himself up. Mrs. Warriner materialized out of somewhere, flinging herself across his line of vision onto Bellew’s shoulders. Bellew shrugged her off. Only half turning, he slapped her backward, and she fell on Ingram’s legs.
“Come on, old Hughie-boy, old shark-killer.’’ Bellew grabbed Warriner’s shoulders and lifted. He was apparently still talking, for Ingram could see his lips move, but all sound was lost then in another cry from Warriner, a mindless, unceasing, animal screaming that lifted the hair on Ingram’s scalp and ran like ice along his back. Warriner lunged upward from behind the wheel, his legs kicking free of the remaining turns of line around them. The line from his wrists to the stanchion gave way. Muscles writhed in his arms. His hands burst apart.
Bellew shifted his grip, caught him about the waist, and lifted. He stepped up on the narrow strip of deck between the cockpit and the rail.
Mrs. Warriner was off Ingram’s legs then, springing up and toward Bellew. Ingram made it to his knees. Warriner’s cry cut off as he saw the water below him, and he spun around in Bellew’s grasp, locking his arms and legs around him as if he were clinging to the bole of a tree, and nothing was visible of his eyes except the whites. Ingram got to his feet but fell backward onto the seat. Saracen rolled down to starboard. Bellew and Warriner began to topple outward. They were already over the lifeline and almost horizontal when Mrs. Warriner leaped out onto Bellew’s back and clamped one arm around his neck while she beat at him with the other hand. All three of them, in one welded and inseparable unit, wheeled slowly over and fell into the sea.
17
“Flashlight!” he shouted to Rae, who was getting up now. He pushed himself off the cockpit seat and raised it to grope in the locker under it for a diving mask. Leaping to the rail, he looked down. None of them had come up. Bellew, even his tremendous strength powerless in Warriner’s cataleptic embrace, couldn’t break free, and Mrs. Warriner wouldn’t. She’d still be trying to separate them when she lost consciousness. Yanking the mask down over his face, he fell backward into the water.
He turned and peered downward but could see nothing. Farther out, the water was faintly illuminated from the spreader lights, but here directly under the side it was in deep shadow and it was impossible to see under the boat at all. He had only a minute or two at the most. Saracen was swinging around on the swell, and by the time he could dive twice there’d be no way of telling where they’d gone under. He kicked downward, swinging his arms in all directions, groping for them. He felt nothing.
Conscious of Saracen’s deadly mass plunging up and down on the swell within feet of him, he felt a moment’s panic. If he lost his bearings and came up under her he could be knocked unconscious. He swam to his right and started up, and at the same instant he heard them. They were under her, bumping and kicking against the hull in their struggle. Then a beam of light penetrated the water just in front of his face. His head came out of the water. Rae was leaning over the side with a flashlight, shining it downward.
“They’re underneath.” He gasped. “Shine it in under the counter.”
She ran back and threw herself flat on deck aft of the cockpit. Reaching an arm over, she threw the beam of light down and forward, past the rudder. He went under again. He was below the turn of the bilge now and could see the light angling down astern, but everything forward of it was in impenetrable shadow. Saracen plunged up and then down, rolling to starboard, toward him. He put a hand up and felt the planking, slick with marine growth, come lunging down against it. He shot downward. It stopped. Pain bit into his palm where it had been cut by a barnacle. As Saracen went back to port he swam down and in, raking the area with his arms. Then he saw Warriner and Bellew.
They were almost straight below him, falling away now and dropping into the beam of light. They were still locked together, but no arms or legs moved, and something like a plume of dark smoke was drifting upward and diffusing in the water above them. It was blood, either from Bellew’s broken nose or from some wound inflicted on one of them by the keel or hull. He kicked downward but knew at the same time it was impossible. He was already running out of breath, and they were nearly fifteen feet below him, still drifting down. But Mrs. Warriner must be still above them. He had to find her. Then his hand brushed something just below him, something soft and fern-like. It was her hair. He entwined his fingers in it and began swimming up and out, away from the hull above him. His chest hurt now, and he wondered if he would make it. He’d been a fool to come under here; his first responsibility was to Rae. Just before he blacked out, his head broke surface and he gulped hungrily at the air.
He was almost under the counter, still too near the rudder and propeller. He swam out, trying to get Mrs. Warriner’s head above the surface. Rae had seen him now. “Others—too far down—no use—” He gasped. “Ladder—” It would take too long to tow her around to the other side. Rae disappeared above him, and almost immediately the ladder was dropped over the starboard side, just forward of him. He swam up to it, towing the inert figure behind him. With the beating he had taken from Bellew, he was very weak now, and he wondered if he could get her aboard. Time was precious. She’d been unconscious for minutes.