The Poseidon Adventure (20 page)

Linda regarded her figure with open contempt and said, 'I guess preacher boy didn't miss much. I can't wait to see how he strips.'

Rogo said, 'Yeah, yeah, honeybun and you'd better take off my coat.'

Linda peered into the water and asked, 'Oh, my God, what's going to happen to my hair?'

Rogo's expression never changed, 'Maybe there's a hairdresser on the other side.' Linda swore at him again.

They began to remove their outer clothing. Jane wondered whether Miss Kinsale was going to be able to manage, or ask for lights out. But the spinster's only reservation was to go off a little to one side to take off her frock and then appear in panties and bra, apparently without the least concern.

They had equipped themselves as he had suggested, strapping their lamps and securing shoes. Scott was a compelling figure in a pair of white shorts, Martin had a small snicker to himself, thinking:
Our padre ain't with it. He should see our line in stripes.

Scott then said, 'I think you had best tell us exactly what to do, Belle.'

Belle said, 'Okay, now? The main thing is don't get scared. All of you can swim. Okay. Well, the first thing is holding your breath. Try, take a big, bellyful of air -- I mean, lungful but fill up from deep down, and then hold it. Don't think about anything and don't count. Counting only makes you nervous. Mr Muller will say when it's forty-five seconds.'

Muller gazed at his watch and held up his arm at the given moment. There was a rush of exhaled breaths and Martin said in surprise, 'I could have held mine longer.'

Susan said, 'So could I.'

'So you see,' Belle said, 'thirty seconds is nothing. I go again first with the rope tied around me.'

Muller asked, 'Is there anything we've to look for?'

Belle replied, 'In the middle, something busted through and sticks out. You can go either over it or under it. I go under it, because there's more room for me. When I get to the other side, I fasten the rope and give two yanks. Then you'll know it's okay. Send the ladies through one at a time when I give two yanks on the cord. You all know you can hold your breath long enough so don't panic. Don't try to swim; pull yourselves along on the rope, it's quicker and you don't use so much energy. If anything goes wrong, I'll come down and get you.'

Belle had turned professional again. She made sure the life-line was well fastened around her and her flashlamp secure. She turned to her husband, 'You ain't worried are you, Manny?'

He replied, 'Like you made it out, it's a breeze, Mamma. Be seeing you!'

She lowered her head and went plummeting down, her lamp glowing.

The rope paid out smoothly. Hubie Muller counted off thirty-five seconds when it went slack and ceased to move. Half a minute later there were two short, sharp jerks on it. 'She's done it,' he said.

CHAPTER XVI

Welcome to Hell

The women went through without a hitch, Miss Kinsale first, then Susan and Jane Shelby. Nonnie covered her fears with a joke, ''Ere goes the big underwater ballet number.' She gazed ruefully at her makeshift bikini, still with the swansdown trimming. 'I'm going to look just terrible when I come out of there.'

Two yanks signalled her safe arrival.

Linda Rogo made the most fuss and held them up the longest. She complained, 'I don't want to go into all that oily stuff. How do we know what's on the other side, or whether we can get anywhere? I think you're all crazy. My hair will be ruined.'

Her husband produced a handkerchief from his discarded dinner-jacket. 'Here. Tie this around your head.'

She made herself a scarf of it and said, 'You come right after me, Rogo, do you hear?'

He said, 'Now honey, you'll be all right. I'd better stay at this end until you've all got through.'

'Still playing Boy Scout,' Linda said. 'Some day I'm going to make you so sorry you ever got me into this.'

She climbed in gingerly and awkwardly, feet first, testing the water. 'Jesus!' she said. 'It stinks.'

'Oh, come on, baby,' Rogo pleaded, 'and don't forget to fill up with air.'

The section of the rope that Muller was holding suddenly leaped to life but not the two signal yanks that had been agreed upon, but something new and it was not until the third time that he got the rhythm: 'Dum-de-de-dum-dum, dum dum . . .' and he recognized it for what it was, Belle Rosen's sense of humour. She was aware that Linda was the last of the women and must be delaying them through sheer cussedness. He could not help grinning to himself. He felt a sudden warmth of affection for Mrs Rosen. His old-maid fastidiousness had made her unattractive, at first. Now she had dramatized herself into someone quite remarkable to him. He said, 'They want to know who's holding up the works.'

Linda told him what he could do, held her nose with one hand, gripped the rope with the other and finally dunked her head. She must have fairly sizzled through because the arrival signal came through much sooner than the others. Shelby said, 'Phew! What a relief. If they can do it that simply, I would imagine we can.' But they stood around for a moment in silence, not wanting to say who would be the first to go.

Scott solved it. 'Your honour,' he said to Manny Rosen, 'you've got a wonderful wife. She'll be glad to see you.'

Manny looked a forlorn figure in a pair of pink and white checked shorts, his stomach protruding. A great wedge of greyish black hair covered his chest. His knees were shaking. He said, 'I don't know if I could do it with holding on to the flashlight. And Mamma's eyeglasses. And what about mine?'

Rogo took over with a curiously affectionate expression on his usually blank face. 'Manny,' he said, 'we're going to fix you up just dandy. You got any handkerchiefs?' With one he tied the torch to Rosen's forearm. With a second he wrapped his wife's glasses and tucked them inside Rosen's shorts. 'Keep your own on. Belle took hers off because she didn't know what she might find down there. Okay, Johnny Weissmuller, don't forget to hold your breath.'

Rosen looked around sheepishly for an instant, 'Anyone thinks I was built for a hero should have his head examined,' took his grip upon the rope and plunged.

One after the other Shelby, Kemal and Scott went through. Muller said to Rogo, 'You've got guts to be the last one.'

Rogo replied, 'Yeah,' with a rising inflection, but made no further comment. He was busying himself with strapping on his big lantern and laying out the remainder of the long coil of rope so that there would be no chance of its tangling or snagging when they went to pull it through after them.

Muller was wondering whether he would be the one to funk it and what it would be like when he was down there in the black with only one last gulp of air in his lungs to see him through. He had little faith left in himself as a man prepared to cope with danger or trouble. Even Rosen, he felt had more guts than himself and seemed better equipped by whatever kind of life he had lived to do the necessary to survive. But at the other end of that passage was Nonnie, poor frightened Nonnie, who had tried to make a joke of it. She would be wet, bedraggled, her hair streaked with oil, naked and shivering. She would be needing him.

Rogo seemed to have read his thoughts. His expression was quite blank again as he said, 'You better git goin'. The kid'll be waiting for you.' Muller felt his contempt but could not blame him. He did his best to put a face on it by saying, 'Be seeing you.'

'Yeah,' Rogo replied, this time without any inflection at all.

Forty-five seconds. The shaft descended some eight feet. His body, filled with air, did not want to go down and he had to pull on the rope hard. His torchlight did not penetrate more than a few feet to show the inevitable piping but the passage narrowed suddenly as though some gigantic force had squeezed it. He saw an outcropping in time not to hit it with his head and the rope bent upwards and along the inside.

He realized that this was a steel walk that had originally been flooring and now was reversed. How many seconds had elapsed? His chest had not yet begun to feel tight. He kept his light on his lifeline and managed to entertain the most absurd thought:
Hubie Muller, if they could see you now!
'they' being the jet set of which he was a part.

Muller endured a thrill of fright as a dark shape ahead seemed to reach out for him. It was rounded and stretched almost to the far side of the passage and was actually a section of a hydraulic pump that had been blown apart. Muller had time to wonder further at the courage of Belle Rosen when she had encountered this obstacle for the first time and had made her decision to swim under it, not knowing what might lie ahead or whether she could ever get back.

There was room enough for him to go over it. He was feeling strain in his lungs. Forty-five seconds could not have passed that quickly. When he had been holding the watch on the others it had seemed much longer. Actually no more than twenty had passed, but he was already aware of the rise of fear that might turn into panic and kill him. Darkness, water, lurking shapes. How brave a man was he by himself? How did one combat fear when one was alone? What resources did men call upon to be men? He could feel his heart pounding and pressure in his throat and chest to let go that precious few cubic inches of air

The back of his hand no longer scraped the steel ridge above him. The rope rose sharply. He pulled at it and shot upwards, his head breaking the surface into a glare of lantern lights. He saw what looked like an assortment of demons straight out of the Inferno: white, half-naked bodies, oil and grime-streaked, limp straggling hair, strange faces that he no longer seemed to recognize. Hands reached for his armpits and he was dragged out of the water and on to a kind of platform. Without ever having encountered the Divine Comedy, little Martin said wryly, 'Welcome to Hell!'

Shelby handed him the rope, the end of which was fastened to a bent bar and said, 'You've made it. It's your yank. Give it two.'

But instead, Muller, like Belle, went, 'Dum de-de-dum- dum,' with it to Rogo at the other end. Thirty seconds later, the detective emerged from the well, resembling something prehistoric rising from the deep.

Muller searched for Nonnie. She had turned away from him and said, 'Oh, don't look at me! Please don't look at me.'

Belle said, 'What's the fuss? Nobody don't exactly look as though they'd been to the beaudy parlour.'

But Muller had seen her, a desperately begrimed nymph. The two pieces of cloth clung to her frail form. Her red hair, darker from the water, was stuck together and clung to her shoulders. Her face, smeared, appeared smaller than ever. Whatever delicacy she had was destroyed. She looked, indeed they all did, as though she had crawled up out of a sewer. Yet somehow the other women bore their filth and dishevelment with a certain dignity. Nonnie's was all gone and Muller longed to enfold and comfort her. For more than ever her queer little person applied that strange twist to his heart for which he could not account. Everything within him told him to take her and let her hide what she felt was her shame close to him. But he could not do it with everyone watching. He could not bring himself to go to her and open himself to her need with the eyes of Linda and all the others on him. He did not do it until later when Scott ordered a rest and the lights put out to save the batteries.

But first Rogo, having regained his breath asked, 'Where the hell are we?'

Scott replied, 'In the engine room.'

'Where do we go from here?'

Scott raised the big lantern and stabbed the heavy darkness with a ray of light that travelled some fifty feet up before it spotlighted a smooth shaft of metal that reflected its shine.

Rogo said, 'Are you kiddin'?'

Scott replied, 'No. Up there, but not directly over our heads, is the outside hull of the ship. But it's still the double bottom Acre told us about. Once we get up there we shall have to make our way still farther aft.'

'You haven't seen the worst yet,' Shelby put in. 'Martin meant it when he welcomed Muller to Hell.' A hollow shout echoed back from the cavernous roof, '. . . to Hell!'

Martin and Rogo sent their beams roving over the appalling scenery of wreckage, an alpine scape of lacerated steel, twisted pipes, dangling wires and girders, peeling dynamos, cliffs of turbine rotors, peaks and ravines made by shattered generators only half-torn loose from their foundations, split open and pouring forth their metal innards.

'The women won't look,' Shelby said, 'we've told them.' Martin added, 'I'm not looking either. It's too much for my stomach. I'd be sick again.'

There were bodies crushed to death and wedged in amongst tangled remains of machinery, twisted ladders and catwalks. A detached arm was lodged in a crevice. The upper half of a man hung from the jagged rim of an electro-hydraulic coupling. Something had sheared him in two at the waist. They could not see his face. His body had long since been drained of blood. And there were bits and pieces no longer with people in them, caught upon edges and these were almost worse than the bodies. One pleading hand was still thrust out from beneath what must have been tons of metal which had crashed down to the level of where the party now found themselves. There was no telling how many dead there were.

The probing lanterns revealed that there was no one alive in the vast cavern. Nor was there so much as a sound except the slight lapping of water of the black lake some twenty yards square. Things unidentified floated on its surface; objects were thrust up out of it that, caught at the sides, had failed to follow the rest of the debris to the bottom of the sea. They themselves were now on a kind of peninsula jutting out from the shore which must originally have been the reverse one of the supervisory platforms at the top of the engine room.

Miss Kinsale suddenly said, 'Oh dear, oh dear.'

Shelby inquired, 'What is it, Miss Kinsale?'

She was sitting close to the edge of the platform with one leg curled under her in the pose of a beach beauty in bikini at a poolside. The astonishing thing was the change made in her by her length of hair. The swim had dragged or knocked it out of its bun and the strands hung to her waist. In the gloom and the occasional passage of a torch beam over her figure she resembled a summer naiad.

She replied, 'Those two poor people, the gentleman you call The Beamer and the girl who always seems to be with him . .

'Oh Lord,' said Jane Shelby.

'Oh, Mummy!' Susan added, 'They said they'd . . .'

'Come after us when they could,' Muller concluded.

Miss Kinsale brushed her long hair out of her eyes and said, 'But they can't. However will they get through where we've come by themselves.'

Rogo said with finality, 'They can't, the stupid slobs.'

Linda snapped, 'Well, it was her idea to stick around. We said we'd take them . . . I mean her.'

Jane Shelby said, 'But you see she was a woman. She wouldn't leave him.'

Her husband shrivelled. They had not even dared to shout for Robin up into that awful black void of shattered gear from which pieces of dead men hung. And Rogo had said the boy would be climbing.

Miss Kinsale said to Linda, 'You mustn't be too hard on her.'

Shelby asked, 'Should we go back for them?'

Linda said, 'And if the guy is still dead drunk?'

There was no answer to this. They were ashamed that there was not, that Linda's toughness for once had let them off from something. No one wanted to go back through that tunnel again. Besides, how to get a man in a drunken sleep to hold his breath while being towed under water. And they had their own case to consider.

'Welcome to Hell,' Martin had said, and in the sense of their surroundings, the ghostly echoes, heat and the feeling of utter abandonment, of having entered the domain of the damned, it was true.

While they had been making their way along the uncertain footing of the ceilings of the ship's corridors, or struggling to overcome the reversed staircases, even during the nightmare of their sojourn in the working alley, they had begun to become somewhat accustomed to this new world of upside-down and there had been still some semblance of things recognizable. The topsy-turvy signs over storerooms and offices confirmed that it was yet a steamer they were inhabiting. With their subterranean entrance into the engine room they had left behind everything they had ever known, could adhere to, or compare. They might have come out on to another planet, the tortured desolation of the pitiless ruptured steel crags and pinnacles revealed by lamplight, and above all, the foul, oil-covered lake on the shores of which they found themselves marooned, drained the courage out of all of them with the exception of Scott.