Uncharted Seas (19 page)

Since there was no necessity for a watch Luvia and all the passengers dined together. Immediately after the meal Synolda declared that the strain of the day had completely worn her out and that she meant to take three Aspros to ensure herself a few hours free from worry. Vicente could hardly protest and Luvia was so troubled by his own disquieting thoughts that he scarcely noticed her leave the table.

The Venezuelan’s first anger at her treatment of him had already cooled off. When he went below ten minutes later he paused for a moment outside her cabin door, but he was desperately tired and horribly depressed, so, with a little shrug of his broad shoulders, he refrained from knocking and passed on.

Luvia bid a curt good night to the others and went off to his cabin; not to sleep but to badger his wits for a way of getting the ship out of the weed when daylight came again.

When he had gone, the remaining three, Basil, De Brissac and Unity, stared at each other in silence for a space.

Unity had been very quiet all day and had said little during the meal. She looked now from side to side studying the grave faces of the two men who were with her, and hoping for a word of comfort; but neither of them had any to give her.

‘Oh God!’ she burst out suddenly. ‘What’re we going to do? What
are
we going to do?’

‘Steady on,’ Basil caught one of her wrists and held it. ‘None of us can do any good by panicking.’

‘But don’t you understand?’ Her voice rose to an hysterical note. ‘We’re trapped—caught in this devilish weed. If we don’t do something we’ll die here.’

De Brissac moved over to the bar. He returned with a small glass of liqueur brandy. ‘Please, Mademoiselle, you have been so brave. You will not add to our distress by breaking down. Drink this; it will warm your heart and calm your nerves.’

Unity shut her eyes and fought to control herself. When she opened them again two large tears glistened on her lashes. ‘Thanks,’ she said hoarsely, ‘I’ll be all right in a minute. I’m sorry.’

‘That’s better.’ Basil managed a smile. ‘We’re not dead yet and nothing like as near it as we were a few days ago.’

‘In that ghastly boat—yes, I suppose so. Yet somehow this seems more horrible. Then we couldn’t have lasted much longer. Just before we reached the ship we were all desperately weak, and it was the sort of end we had at least read about in newspapers and books. Now we’re all fit as fiddles again. We’ve space to walk about and comfortable beds to sleep in. But we’ve less chance of escape than we should have in any bastille. Think of living like this for weeks, months, perhaps; eking out our provisions and knowing that once they’re gone there’s not the faintest hope of obtaining any more. Dying of slow starvation in this frightful solitude and watching death creep nearer day after day—day after day.’

‘No, no. Our case is not as bad as all that.’ De Brissac shook his head. ‘We may have to possess our souls in patience for some days—a week or more perhaps. But we have enough food to last us a long time yet and plenty of water. If we need more, why, we can distil some now we are in the ship. Sooner or later a storm will come. The weed will be tossed about—broken up again. When that happens we sail away into the open sea.’

‘You think so—really?’ she asked doubtfully.

‘
Certainement
. Did not Luvia tell us that these great weed belts have no fixed centre? It is our bad luck only that we struck this unusually thick patch. In a heavy sea even this is bound to tear and scatter. Be of good cheer, Mademoiselle, I beg. Our imprisonment is only temporary.’

‘That’s right,’ Basil agreed. ‘Look at the way the end of the creek moved away from us without our having noticed it while we were trying to break through in the opposite direction. The stuff is shifting all the time. Even without a storm we may wake
up tomorrow or the next day to find ourselves in a clear space again.’

Unity swallowed the last of the brandy in her glass. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right,’ she said a little more cheerfully. ‘I only hope so. Anyway, I’m going to follow Synolda’s example—and go to bed. It’s the atmosphere of this place, I think, that gets me down.’

The two men stood up with her and, almost directly, followed her below. Both had done their best to appear optimistic for her sake, but somehow neither of them believed in their hearts one word that they had said. The utter stillness of their strange surroundings that were neither sea nor land made a storm in such a place seem quite unthinkable. They had a horrid feeling that she was right, and that the
Gafelborg
would never come free of the weed to plough once more the open seas.

Next morning visibility was bad; a haze rather than a mist obscured distant objects, although the immediate surroundings of the ship were comparatively clear.

Luvia had been up on deck twice during the night and said at breakfast that, although they appeared to be fast in the weed, they were actually still moving; the whole mass was drifting roughly southward as he had observed from careful watching of their masts against the stars.

‘There you are,’ Basil looked across at Unity, ‘what did I tell you last night. We’re not really stuck at all. It only needs a bit of a breeze and the weed will automatically break up into patches.’

‘I’m not waiting for any breeze,’ declared Luvia. ‘I mean to cut my way out.’

‘How will you?’ asked Vicente quickly.

‘By using her stern instead of her bow. God knows why I didn’t think of it yesterday, but the hunch came to me last night just when I was chucking in my hand as beat. If we go dead slow astern the propellers’ll cut a path for us through the weed instead of piling it up into a barrier. Get the idea?’ He smiled round at them with pardonable pride.

‘Oh, but how marvellous!’ Synolda exclaimed, clapping her hands together. Luvia basked for a moment in the glow of her admiration, but she caught Vicente’s black eyes fixed upon her stonily, and her enthusiasm ebbed as quickly as it had risen.

‘Sounds a good scheme,’ agreed Basil, ‘as long as there’s no risk of your breaking your propellers.’

‘What! break my propellers on this pulpy muck?’ Luvia
laughed. ‘Not likely! Why the blades will chop it to ribbons—you’ll see. Come on, let’s go get on the job.’

They swallowed their coffee and followed him up to the bridge. The channel by which they had penetrated so deeply into the weed had disappeared altogether. No others could be seen in that direction, and the weed presented a uniform, bright-green surface for as far as they could see before the haze baffled their vision. The other sectors showed the same dreary uniformity with the one exception of that over the port beam. Here, just where the haze limited their outlook, broken water varied the scene. During the night the ship had turned a little, but that was undoubtedly the open, island-dotted area they had attempted to reach the day before.

Luvia gave his orders and placed Basil at the starboard side of the stern rail, taking up a similar position to port himself. He waved his arm, and De Brissac, at the extreme port end of the bridge, acknowledged his signal; the ship slowly began to move.

By hanging right over the rail the two men in the stern could each keep an eye on one of the propellers. They were churning the water into foam and severing the weed like two huge chaff cutters; great hunks of it, wet and glistening, were continually cast up and thrown outward by the force of the strokes, to splash a dozen yards away.

For ten minutes all went well; the ship made slow but encouraging progress. Suddenly Basil saw the starboard screw stop turning. Instantly he flung up his arm, and Jansen, watching from his side of the bridge, cut off the engine.

‘Propeller fouled eh?’ Luvia said, coming across. ‘The main stems of this dratted weed are thicker than I thought, but we don’t have to worry. Vedras and a couple of men can pull themselves round in the boat and cut it free. Even if we’re held up this way a couple of dozen times we’ll make the open water before evening.’

The boat was already alongside as it had never been hoisted from the water since they had reboarded the
Gafelborg
, but towed astern of them on a long painter.

Vicente, Largertöf and Isiah went down the rope ladder to it; they poled and paddled with the oars the short distance until they were right under the stern. With hatchets and sheath-knives they succeeded in cutting away the thick stem which had become entangled in the screw.

‘A piece great and fleshy of a thickness as of my arm above the
elbow,’ Vicente described it when he was back on board. Luvia signalled ‘Slow Astern’ again and the vessel proceeded.

Another useful distance was covered before the ship was brought up short for the second time; the starboard propeller was fouled again, and Vicente again went over the side with his crew of two.

Basil and Luvia leaned together over the stern rail watching the men at work.

Vicente looked up and called to them: ‘This is a worse one; he is much greater round,’ and they saw that the mighty weed trunk the screw had raked up was nearly as thick as a man’s thigh.

As the axes cut into it the great stem squelched and bubbled, but it was tough, like rubber, and appeared to have a hard, sinewy core.

Suddenly a long, brown, slimy tentacle reached up out of the weed and inward over the gunwale of the boat. Luvia saw it flickering there for an instant blindly searching, rippling like a snake, and yelled a warning. Next second it touched Isiah and circled round his waist.

At Luvia’s shout the men in the boat had looked upward instead of down, and their backs were towards the octopus that had come upon them. Isiah was caught before he even realised the danger and when the others swung round he was already in the grip of the tentacle.

Having felt its prey the great sea beast suddenly became violently active. There was a mighty flurry in the weed which scattered it in all directions. Another glistening arm shot up, another and another, so that in less than a minute a whole multitude of them appeared to be waving and diving here, there and everywhere. Only the tip of one tentacle had appeared at first, but, as the brute rose out of the water, its great size became apparent. Each arm was as big as a full-grown python, and on its inner side it had a graduated row of saucer-like suckers.

‘It’s a squid,’ shouted Luvia, ‘a great squid. I must get the guns—nothing else any good,’ and he darted away aft to get them from the arms locker of which he held the key.

Isiah was screaming with uncontrollable terror as he clung for his life to one of the thwarts. Young Largertöf lifted his axe, but panicking, misjudged his stroke so that in bringing it down on the greater feeler it also cut into Isiah’s ribs.

Vicente pulled from his pocket an automatic that he had left in his cabin when abandoning the ship. The noise of its explosions
drowned the shouting as he emptied the whole of its contents into a great limb that was reaching out for him.

The boat rocked violently, the octopus had one feeler round its bow and another curled about a thwart. It was so powerful that it could have upset the heavy life-boat if that had been its purpose.

Basil stood helpless on the deck above, paralysed with terror for the men below, but only for a second, the next he had seized a rope and flung it over the stern. It hit Largertöf on the head; he swayed back and caught it.

‘Hitch it to a thwart,’ yelled Basil. ‘Hitch it to the stern thwart.’ He knew that there was no time to pull each man up separately.

At that moment the boat almost turned over as the face of the brute appeared over the gunwale and it attempted to heave itself right out of the water. Two enormous, soulless eyes as big as plates stared up at the ship fixed and unwinking; between them was an evil, dull white, parrot-like beak.

Isiah was still clinging to the thwart; blood was dripping from his side and he moaned unceasingly. The wounded tentacle which gripped his waist seemed to have little strength left in it, but stark terror had robbed him of the power to free himself from it and rise.

Another of the octopus’s waving, leathery arms suddenly whipped round his neck; his hold on the thwart was broken and he was drawn upright. His eyes seemed to start out of his grey face as he was lifted right out of the boat. His legs waved grotesquely, and Vicente flung himself forward to grab the nearest of them, but it was too late. For a second Isiah dangled from the end of the tentacle, like a hanged man, almost on a level with the stern of the ship, then the lower part of the great arm relaxed and the wretched man disappeared with a loud plop into the weed.

Basil succeeded in taking a couple of turns with the rope round the nearest winch. Darting to the ship’s side he saw that Largertöf had managed to hitch his end to the after thwart. Isiah had vanished.

‘Hang on,’ shouted Basil, ‘hang on. I’m going to tilt up the boat.’ He rushed back to the winch and thrust over the lever.

Luvia and De Brissac came pounding up, each holding a Winchester. They saw Largertöf cowering back in the stern as a wriggling tentacle reached after him and Vicente, stretched straight out clinging to one thwart with his arms and another
with his crossed legs, while one of the brute’s feelers twisted sinuously about his body.

‘A devil-fish,’ panted De Brissac. ‘Fire at his eyes—the only spot he is vulnerable.’

Luvia’s Winchester cracked as the Frenchman spoke. The bullet smacked on to the octopus’s cuttle beak, ricocheted, and whined away into the distance.

The winch clattered, the rope strained until it seemed certain that it would part, but with a great sucking sound the stern of the boat suddenly left the water. Its bow dipped and, as the winch wound in the rope the life-boat tilted at a steeper and steeper angle, but the great cuttlefish maintained its hold, and was coming up with it. One of the feelers, thirty feet in length, reached out, flicked through the deck-rail and made a grab at Luvia.

He leapt aside just as De Brissac fired. The Frenchman had taken careful aim and got a bull. A jet of filthy blackish-red liquid spurted up from the creature’s left eye, which shuddered like a mass of jelly. The tentacle that had sought for Luvia found a hold on De Brissac’s leg, but he did not lose his nerve. Remaining steady at the rail he fired again and again straight down into the eyes of the monster. Gradually its hold relaxed, its tentacles began to thrash wildly, and, with a terrific splash, it fell back into the sea.