“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.”