Barbara shifted the heavy thermos jug to her left hand and the big flashlight to her right and switched it on as she walked toward the trees under the prow. It showed the deep keel jammed between the lower branches of three of the mangroves.
Benjy laid down old KKK in his blanket on the road.
Hester and Helen set down their bags and knelt anxiously beside the old man.
Benjy came up behind Barbara. He was panting. “Shine her — on the hull,” he managed to say.
They pushed their way through the undergrowth, shining the flashlight upward on one side of the keel, then on the other. Barbara made out the boat’s name: “Albatross.”
“Don’t seem to be no holes in her,” Benjy said after a bit, speaking close to Barbara’s ear. “Reckon her mast must be broke off short, though, or you’d have seen it. I think she float with the tide. Maybe she jam too tight, but I don’t think so. I can climb up by the branches, and then I got this to help you all up.” He touched the rope slung in loops around his chest.
The wind died a little and he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted up: “Hello! Anybody aboard?”
The lull in the wind held for two seconds more, then as it rose again, Benjy said: “Seem to me I hear a wailing then. Different from the wind.”
“So did I,” Barbara replied, her teeth chattering — mostly from the cold, she told herself. She flashed her light straight overhead. “Oh, my God!”
Poking out over the side of the boat in the middle of the flashlight beam was a tiny white furious face with mouth open wide.
“It’s a little kid!” Benjy cried.
“Be ready to catch him, Benjy,” Barbara said.
“It’s a baby!” Helen yelled, coming up behind them. She waved her hand at the little wailing face. “You stay up there now, baby! Don’t you drop. We a-coming!”
Sally Harris and Jake Lesher cringed from the downdraft of the big rotors which whipped their clothes and made them squint their eyes, and which wildly blew about the charcoal-starter flame they’d fired in the barbecue bowl as an SOS beacon.
It was dark but clear, and the golden and purple beams of the Wanderer rising in its dinosaur face twinkled from black wavelets almost level with the penthouse patio floor and occasionally foaming over it, but the wind from the rotors drove the foam back.
The big helicopter masked the gray sky overhead and its rotors cut darkened circles in it.
A white rope-ladder came snaking down toward them and with it a big voice that called: “I got room for only one more!”
Jake snagged the ladder with one hand and lunged for Sally with the other, but the flames were between them, and as she started past she knocked the barbecue bowl over ahead of her, and the hot fuel hissed against the water and went up in a great blinding sheet, driving her back. An instant later all flame was gone, but now the ladder was tugging Jake away. He turned and grabbed the lowest rung with both hands and pulled himself clear. His feet skimmed the patio floor. The next moment he dropped off and tumbled in a heap against the balustrade, the wavelets foaming around him.
The helicopter dipped violently. The wavelets cringed from its rotors, which almost touched them. The ladder fell away from the helicopter and floated on the wavelets like the skeleton of a giant centipede. The ’copter lifted and beat off north without another word.
Jake scrambled to his feet and watched its small lights grow tinier.
Sally came behind him. “Why’d you let go, Jake?” “I was afraid I’d crack my shins against the railing,” he told her self-disgustedly. “I couldn’t help it.” She clung to him.
Chapter Thirty-eight
As Hunter steered the Corvette slowly down the next to the last hill to the Coast Highway, the emerald sun setting on the watery horizon was still bright enough to show what looked like at least a mile of new beach stretching out beyond the old one to the edge of a calm sea. He grinned around at the others, his nerves untouched by the eeriness of their green-lit faces. He had a childish impulse to shout to Hixon in the truck just behind: “What’d I tell you? Dead low or near it! — I hit it on the nose!”
“Look, Mommy,” Ann said, “a vine growing across the road1.”
It couldn’t be that, Hunter knew, but it was some sort of vegetable debris, perhaps a branch torn down and blown there by yesterday’s rainstorm. There was the faintest popping sound as the tires rolled across it. The car skidded a little, and he straightened it and decreased speed. He did this quite automatically since like the others his attention was preoccupied by the degree to which the sea had receded. A mile now seemed a gross underestimate. He was at first amazed, then fascinated, finally plain awestruck.
Going downhill made the sun set faster. The green light grew gloomy. Although the ocean was so far away, its reek was strong and fishy. There was no wind, and save for the chug of the two motors there was a general hush. No cars were passing along the Coast Highway, he remarked to himself — and only then realized that the stupid part of his mind had still been expecting them.
They started down the last hill. Again the car skidded a fraction, and this time Hunter shifted into low as he straightened.
“I don’t remember that ruined house,” Rama Joan said thoughtfully.
“And I don’t remember the old boat out in the field,” Margo chimed in from behind her.
There was a sudden squawking. “Look at those white birds pecking on the hillside,” Wanda observed shrilly. “Why, I do believe they’re gulls.”
“Here comes another vine,” Ann informed them. “No, two. Oh, and a fish.”
At that word a horror gripped Hunter and the scene around him turned nightmarish, though for the moment he didn’t quite know why — there was something dreadfully obvious his mind refused to see. Hixon was honking behind him. Did the fool want to pass? One — two — three — four. Four honks meant something, but he couldn’t remember what, because now he realized that the horror was the illusion that they were traveling under the sea — the silence, the gloomy green light, the black road changing by imperceptible degrees to a feather-smooth slope of silty slime, the fishy reek ("…and a fish!"), the seaweed bladders popping as they drifted across the two “vines"…
Four means stop, Doc had said. Instantly, but very gingerly, Hunter put on the brakes. At first the car hardly slowed at all. Then gradually it came to a halt, slewing around in spite of all his steering — came to a stop because its tires were pushing up ridges of silt from a smooth coating an inch or more thick on the road.
He looked back along the road, simply because the car was now facing almost backwards, and he saw the truck, green in the last of the sunlight, stopped, unslewed, fifty feet or so behind. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and his heart was pounding.
It was Rama Joan who put the dreadfully obvious into words. She said, rather casually: “We must have passed the highwater mark a quarter of a mile back.”
That was what was jolting his muscles and drumming his heart, Hunter realized — and as he realized it, his body began to quiet — simply the thought of the salt water that had been everywhere here and dozens of feet overhead, only six hours ago, leaving behind its sea-life and its sea-earth and its wreckage, the salt water that would be here again six hours from now — the thought of the tides of a few feet now sinking at low beneath the continental shelves and rushing back at high over the foothills of mountains.
The women were taking it with an incomprehensible calm, he thought. It would have seemed more natural if they’d been screaming.