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.