03 Underwater Adventure (14 page)

‘All right, let’s get along,’ cried Skink. 1 can’t wait to show up this four-flusher.’

Aqualunged and masked, Blake, Hal, Skink and Roger descended to the wreck and then, led by Hal, swam out three hundred feet to the labyrinth of rocks. Hal conducted them unerringly through the twisting passages to the mouth of the cave.

The interior was completely dark. Blake would have turned on his torch but Hal restrained him. He took Blake and Skink in to a point where, when the light went on, they would be face to face with the stolen treasures. He wanted to see just how both of them would act when the evidence of Skink’s guilt loomed up before them.

Like a stage manager striving for dramatic effects, Hal made them wait a few moments in the dark so that the scene would be all the more startling when the lights went on.

After an impressive pause, he signalled them to use their torches by clicking on his own.

Everything was suddenly bathed in blinding light. Every detail of the rocky wall, ceiling, floor, every crack and corner, was clearly revealed.

Hal could hardly believe his eyes, and yet there was not the least doubt about it… .

The cave was empty.

Blake and Skink turned to fix questioning eyes on Hal. He pressed through between them and went to the end of the cave.

He ran his fingers over the wall as if to make sure that it was solid - not just a screen to hide the treasure. He felt into every crack and hollow. He explored the bottom on the chance that there might be a hole through which the treasure had dropped.

He knew that he was making himself quite ridiculous. Blake would be more sure than ever that he was affected with nitrogen fever, drunkenness of the depths, that caused men to see strange visions, things that just weren’t there.

Had he really seen the treasure in this cave? His mind

was confused and bewildered. Perhaps he had spent too much time at this depth and the pressure was upsetting him.

Or perhaps this was not the right cave! It would be easy to make a mistake among the many caverns of this wilderness of rocks. That was it - he was just in the wrong cave.

He went outside and looked at the entrance again, and the surrounding boulders. He saw all the landmarks that he had committed to memory - that huge brain coral, the elkhorn tree shaped like a cross, the tall rock leaning forward that he had thought looked like a giant old woman. He was sure this was the place.

The others were rising to the surface. He went back into the grotto. He had a dim hope that by some magic the treasure would reappear. It did not.

He joined the others on the deck of the Lively Lady and found himself apologizing to Blake. ‘Sorry I took you on a wild-goose chase. But I could have sworn …’

Blake was very patient.

‘I know. It’s a strange world down there and if a fellow stays too long he gets some of the strangeness into his head. What you need is to rest on deck. No more diving for you today.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Hal said wearily and stretched out on the deck.

‘Before you get too comfortable,’ Skink said acidly, ‘you can apologize to me. You said something about my stealing that stuff - remember?’

‘I’ll apologize fast enough if I’m wrong,’ Hal answered, ‘but I’m still not convinced. There’s something queer about all this.’

‘I’ll say there’s something queer,’ Skink said contemptuously, ‘ - your head.’ Hal did not answer.

Roger, with the kink that thinking always put in his forehead, sat studying his brother. It wasn’t like Hal to go nuts. His head was like a good watch - you could always depend upon it. If he said he saw the treasure in that cave, he saw it. Suddenly the kink disappeared from Roger’s forehead and he called to Dr Blake: ‘There’s one thing we forgot.’ ‘What’s that?’

‘To look in the wreck and see if those things are really gone.’

‘Of course they’re not gone!’ Dr Blake was having difficulty in keeping his temper. His patience was sorely tried. ‘Now, look at it sensibly. How could anyone take anything from that wreck and make away with it under water? He could put it in a cave, but what good would that do him? He couldn’t take it away without a ship. And if it stayed in the cave very long we would discover ft. Anyhow, we found it wasn’t in the cave.’ ‘Perhaps Skink had already removed it.’ ‘How could he? You forget that he was on deck every minute from the time Hal reported the treasure was in the cave till the time we went down and found it wasn’t there. How could he have removed it - by magic?’ Roger shook his head. It was too deep for him. ‘Another thing -‘ Skink put in, ‘your brother claims that the figurehead was in the cave. That thing was life size and solid bronze. It must have weighed a quarter of a ton. You flatter me if you think I’m strong enough to pull that off the ship and carry it three hundred feet/

A broad smile of self-satisfaction spread over Skink’s face. Let the runt answer that one.

Roger did. T could have carried it off myself. I took a look at that figurehead. It wasn’t fastened to the bow -it had broken off, and was just held in position by the rocks. And as for the weight - I don’t think that thing would weigh more than three hundred pounds above water and at a depth of ten fathoms its weight would be cut to a hundred pounds - just a good heavy load for one man.’ He turned to Blake. ‘Isn’t that right?’

Blake nodded. ‘But you haven’t explained how the stuff disappeared from the cave, if it was ever there.’

Hal resented this remark. ‘It was there,’ he insisted. His mind was clearing now. He was sure he had not dreamed all this. ‘And if you’ll come down with me again you’ll find it isn’t in the wreck.’

Skink hastily objected. ‘You won’t drag us down there on any more fool’s errands.’

Hal ignored Skink and addressed himself to Dr Blake. ‘What can we lose by going down? Even if there’s only the faintest chance that a thief is working on the cargo, isn’t it important for us to find out about it?’

Blake sighed deeply. ‘You win! Just to satisfy you, we’ll go down.’

‘How about making it first thing tomorrow morning?’ Skink suggested. ‘It’s getting dark and I think Omo has supper ready.’

Blake wavered. The good smell of hot food came up from the cabin. Then he saw something in Skink’s face that made him say, ‘No, we’ll go now.’

They sank through the darkening sea. The torches were clicked on even before they reached the deck. They entered the stern castle.

The doors of the cabinets hung open and the cabinets were empty. It was Dr Blake’s turn to show excitement. He went to the cabinets, explored them, searched the room, even peered under the table, then stood staring at Skink with a look that made that gentleman squirm.

Turning, Blake led the way up the stair to the master cabin. Their torches lit up the great room and several fish and an octopus swam out of reach. The beam of Dr Blake’s torch picked out the great chair. The figure that had made itself at ease there for three hundred years was gone. The fallen warriors had also disappeared.

They went down and out and around the forward castle to the prow. There was no bronze Neptune.

Back on the Lively Lady Blake tore out his mouthpiece and gave vent to the anger and dismay that he would have liked to express at the bottom of the sea. After he had blown off he turned to Skink.

‘Inkham, what do you know about all this?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Skink blandly. ‘Apparently Hunt is the only one who has any information on the subject. It seems that he went down, and the stuff disappeared. He says I took it Isn’t it more likely that he did?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ exploded Blake. But he was deeply puzzled. He knew that Hal Hunt was not capable of such an act, and that Inkham was. But Inkham seemed to be in the clear. Then was someone else the thief? The captain? Omo? Impossible. How could any outside man have done the job? They were a hundred and fifty miles from anywhere.

‘Captain, have you sighted any ship today?’

‘Nary a one - and don’t expect to. We’re away outside

the lanes.’ Blake cudgelled his brain. ‘The invisible man - who

could he be? And where could he take the stuff? The nearest place is this island. We’ll investigate that tomorrow morning. In the meantime we’ll take no more chances. We’ll keep a guard on that wreck day and night. The watches will be one hour long. I’ll go first, then Hal, then Roger, then Omo. Then we’ll repeat.’

‘How about me?’ inquired Skink.

‘We’ll let you get a good night’s rest.’

Skink glowered fiercely but said nothing. He went down to supper and the others followed. Blake ate lightly, for it was not well to dive after a heavy meal. Then he sank into the black sea, trailing light from his torch like a departing comet.

After an hour he was back, reporting all quiet, except that hundreds of strange fish never seen by day had come in from deep water and were milling around the wreck.

‘You’ll have plenty of company,’ he told Hal. ‘Every octopus in the ship has come out of its hole and is spending the evening on deck.’

While Hal was below Roger tried to catch a nap, but the unhappy anticipation of having to spend an hour at the bottom of the sea at night kept him fully awake. When it came to his turn, he would have swapped it for a brass farthing. He made sure that his knife was sharp and took along a shark billy as well.

He climbed down the ladder to the lowest rung and stood there for a full minute, mustering up courage to go in. There was no moon but the sky was full of stars. The cold night breeze made him shiver and think of his bunk. The ship’s smells of sails and planks and engine oil seemed mighty good. Was it really necessary to keep guard on the wreck?

Hal leaned over the rail. ‘If you don’t fancy going down,’ he said, ‘I can take another turn.’

Roger didn’t know whether to be grateful or offended. He released his hold on the ladder and swam down.

If the sky had been full of stars, so was the sea. He could imagine himself swimming through the Milky Way. Millions of phosphorescent lights flashed on and off. The lights were sometimes single, sometimes in rows, sometimes in star shapes, sometimes in circles. They were red, yellow, green, blue, lavender.

He tried to imagine what strange shapes, what fish, serpents, monsters, lay behind them. He turned on his flashlight.

It made a conical beam of light in the water, but outside of the beam everything was darker and more mysterious than before. He felt as if jaws were about to close on him from behind. He swung around, playing the beam in every direction. This only blinded him the more.

It took nerve to turn off the beam. At first he could not see a tiling, not even the phosphorescence. His eyes gradually became adjusted to the millions of underwater traffic lights, and he could even make out the shapes behind them.

Some of the illuminated creatures lit up others. A school of glowing jellyfish cast a ghostly light over a big grouper that seemed to be studying Roger with interest while opening and closing its mouth as if it were saying, ‘Oh, brother!’ A scurry of shrimp lighted the stump of a mast of the Santa Cruz. He followed the mast down to the deck. A large fish swam by leaving a trail of phosphorescence behind it. It illuminated hundreds of small octopuses waltzing over the deck on the tips of their tentacles.

Roger thought it just as well not to settle on the deck but to float ten or twenty feet above it.

Even here the eight-legged merrymakers did not leave him alone but occasionally shot by him like comets, all tentacles laid close and straight to make the body perfectly streamlined.

The rock and coral formations of the undersea landscape were picked out in lights and the big fifteen-foot elkhorns were as fantastic as Joshua trees. Everything was on the move. The sea worms, sea urchins, and starfish trotted about with an alacrity that one would never suspect, having seen them only by day. The conger eels and morays that play a waiting game all day long had come out of their holes and were actively searching for food. They plunged at any small flashing thing. Roger was glad that he had rubber fins on his feet, and he kept his hands close against his body. A flick of his fins now and then was all that was necessary to keep him suspended.

In the darkness the sounds of the underworld seemed louder than they had ever been by day. Did he hear someone climbing up on to the deck? No, it was just a large fish scratching itself against the wreck to scrape off some parasites. There were grinding sounds that perhaps came from parrotfish crunching coral with their horny beaks.

He knew that many fish have been named because of the sounds they make, and probably the grunts he heard came from the grunts and the croaks from the croakers and the squealing sounds from the pig fishes.

As a matter of fact, the supposedly silent sea is full of sounds and Roger heard only a few of them that night The schoolmaster rumbles as if delivering a lecture. The oldwife chirps and chatters. The drumfish drums, the porpoise snorts and the singing fish produces musical notes much in the manner of a cricket or grasshopper.

But to Roger every sound he heard was made by the invisible man coming on board to steal more of the treasures of the Santa Cruz. A dozen times he heard him creeping stealthily over the bulwarks - but each time he proved to be a fish or octopus.

He did not light his torch again since that would instantly reveal his position and he might be attacked from behind. He kept close to the mast so that its shadow would blend with his own. Even so, he did not feel at all comfortable. It was enough to be startled every moment or so by the whizz of a passing octopus or the curiosity of a fish poking his flesh with its nose, without the apprehension that the invisible man, or men, might gang up on him. With so rich a store almost within their grasp, they would not stop at murder.

He suspected Skink, but Skink could not have engineered the thing alone. He could have taken the treasure to the cave, but who took it from the cave? Not Skink -he was on deck. It could hardly be the work of an octopus or any other marine creature. It must be the work of humans - if men who lived under the sea could be called humans. Could they possibly be some strange breed of man that breathed by means of gills rather than lungs? His fancy played with the idea.