The compressed air spurted out of the six-inch hose with a sudden wallop, and for a moment I almost lost my grip on it. There was a compensator on the hose which prevented any diver who was using it from being jet-propelled all around the sea-bed; but all the same it felt as if it had a life of its own, and after two or three minutes of blasting away at the silt on the bottom of the sea, my arms were aching and my back felt as if I had deputized for Lon Chancy in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
We worked almost blind, because of the dense clouds of silt which the airhose blew up all around us. On our second dive, we would use an airlift, which would clear most of the silt away, but on this dive Quamus had to break through the consolidated layer of grit and shell which lay beneath the first thin coating of silt and mud and 'anchorage gash' — that assorted refuse which you always find on the bottom of the sea wherever boats are moored. To break through, Quamus used a long metal rod with a sharpened end, and once I had blown away the initial mud, he began to hack at the grit with relentless energy.
We were surrounded by whirling debris: shell, mud, startled hermit-crabs, slipper limpets, clams, and grotesque sponges. I felt as if our underwater world had gone mad, an Alice-in-Wonderland turmoil of shellfish, silt, and bobbing Coca-Cola bottles. But after ten minutes' work, Quamus gripped my arm and squeezed it twice, which was our pre-arranged signal that the first dive was over. Quamus thrust his iron rod into the hole he had made, and marked it with a bright orange flag. Then he finned slowly up to the surface, and I followed him.
'How's it going?' asked Walcott, helping us onboard.
'You're kicking up enough mud down there.' He pointed to the surface of the bay, where a wide muddy stain was already spreading above the wreck.
'We're through to the lower layer of silt,' said Quamus, impassively, as Laurie helped him out of his oxygen-cylinders. 'We should be able to start work with the airlift now.'
'Anybody asked you what we're up to?' I said.
Walcott shrugged. 'A couple of fishermen came past and asked if I knew where they could sink their lines for the best flounder. So I sent them out to Woodbury Point.'
'They won't catch much flounder there,' said Quamus.
'Exactly,' said Walcott.
We rested for fifteen minutes or so, and then Laurie kitted us up with fresh oxygen cylinders and we prepared to go down again. It was almost twenty before ten now, and I was anxious that we should complete this dive as soon as possible. I didn't want the coastguard prowling around; nor did I want Edward or Forrest or Dan Bass to notice that Walcott's lugger was anchored right over the wreck of the David Dark. For all I knew, they might be planning to dive on the wreck themselves this morning, to put down markers before they registered it.
For a further half-hour, Quamus and I toiled away on the bottom of the sea, blowing away the silt from the side of the David Dark’s hull. At last, we saw dark encrusted timbers, and Quamus made the 'okay' sign to indicate that we were making good progress. With only three or four minutes of oxygen left, we completed a 20-foot deep scour-pit into the soft silt down beside the hull, which Quamus marked with his flag. Then he made the thumb's-up sign for 'surface'.
I turned around, giving a first strong kick of my fins, and to my horror I became entangled in something like wet white sheeting. I struggled and kicked against it, and as I did so I felt the soft bumping of swollen flesh inside it. It was the floating corpse of Mrs James Goult, which had somehow been drawn towards the wreck of the David Dark, either by the tidal stream, or by the air-suction work we had been doing on it, or by some other inexplicable magnetism.
Don't panic: I told myself. And I tried to remember what Dan Bass had told me, in my three lessons at Forest River Park. I reached for my knife, tugged it out, and tried to cut the floating wet shroud away from me. My blood thundered in my ears, and my breathing sounded like a railroad locomotive. I ripped through linen, cut through seams, but the fabric seemed to billow all around me and entangle me even more.
In total fright, I felt the corpse bump against me again, and its arms somehow wrap themselves around my legs, making it impossible for me to kick myself to the surface. At that same moment, with a squeaky sigh, my oxygen ran out, and I realized I had less than two minutes to make it up to the surface before I suffocated.
Thrashing, panicking, I began to sink slowly to the seabed, the corpse embracing me like a long-lost lover. Is that what Mictantecutli wanted after all? I thought to myself. Did he really want me, and me alone, because my unborn son had cheated him of the chance to feast on my heart? I sucked desperately at my mouthpiece, but my oxygen was completely exhausted, and my lungs began to feel as if they were going to collapse from lack of air.
It was then that the corpse shuddered, and suddenly whirled away. The shroud was dragged off me, and my arms and legs were disentangled. My face-mask clear, I saw Quamus rolling away from me in the murky water, brandishing his iron shaft. On the end of it, deeply impaled, was the blue-skinned, half-decayed body of Mrs Goult, chunks of flesh flaking off her like rotting tuna. Quamus gave her one last twist, and then sent her sinking slowly down to the bottom, the shaft still sticking out of her bare-ribbed chest. He swam back a little way, seized my arm, and urgently pointed upwards. I nodded. I needed no second bidding. I was almost blacking out from oxygen starvation.
Back on the lugger, shaken as both of us were, we said nothing to Walcott or his daughter about what we had seen. Laurie made us each a cup of hot black coffee, and we rested for another 15 minutes while Walcott prepared the dynamite. Each of the two crates was heavily weighted so that it would sink directly to the bottom; and then, once we had maneuvered it into position, it would sink just as quickly into our 20-foot hole.
‘Think the weather's going to hold?' I asked Walcott, finishing my coffee.
'Could be,' he remarked.
As I shouldered my next two oxygen tanks, I thought briefly of Anne Putnam: the witch who had sacrificed herself so that I would not feel obliged to let Mictantecutli go free. Well, I thought to myself, I still don't have to make a final decision, not until the copper vessel has been brought ashore; and even then I'll have time to think it over. I believed what old man Evelith had told me, about the malevolent power that Mictantecutli could wreak; but I was still strongly tempted to let the Fleshless One go free, and recover the wife and son-to-be whom I so dearly loved:
Yet how much was I kidding myself? How much of this desire to restore Jane to life was real conviction, and how much of it was ridiculous romantic bravado? I had already accepted Jane's death more than I would have thought possible. What was making love to Gilly, but an acceptance that I would never be making love to Jane again? If I had left on a six-weeks' business trip, I wouldn't have been unfaithfuclass="underline" I wouldn't even have thought of it. Yet Jane had been dead now for very little longer than that, and here I was going to bed with another woman.
More than that: what kind of relationship was I going to be able to have with Jane, once and if she was restored to life? What do you say to somebody who's been dead and buried?
I was still thinking about this when Quamus gripped my arm, and said, 'Time to go, Mr Trenton. Second-to-last dive.'
Planting the dynamite proved to be the easiest job of all. All we had to do was tumble it end over end until it was perched on the brink of the hole we had excavated, connect the fuses, and let it sink slowly down. When both cases had disappeared into the darkness, Quamus and I packed as much grit and shell and debris as we could into the hole, to make sure that the full force of the explosion would be directed towards the hull of the David Dark. As we swam back to the surface, paying out fuse from a small reel, I thought of Edward, and what he would have said if he had known what we were doing. I actually felt sorry for him. In a minute or two, we would be shattering the dream of his life.