Uncharted Seas (35 page)

Deveril was well in front of the other two. Although he was a tall, well-built young man, he was considerably slimmer than his companions and weighed less so he was making better progress but, even so, he was now acutely anxious. Each time he floated through the air his legs trailed out behind him so that he looked straight down into the weed. The hummocks and tangles of it which showed above the water-line glistened, sparkling wetly in the sun. The weed itself was by no means unpleasant to look on; but here and there he noticed a sudden, sinister disturbance in it and knew that some vile thing must be moving close under the spiky fronds of its countless tendrils. Plunging forward as he floated down the effort to draw his legs to the front and make another jump grew ever greater. His head was dizzy with the effort and he was half blinded by the perspiration that trickled into his eyes.

De Brissac, staggering along behind in a wild series of erratic hops, began to fear that they would never reach the ship, but he had a sudden inspiration now they were comparatively near to it. Luvia might be able to shoot them a lifeline from the rocket-gun if they fell and, if only their luck held, pull them aboard before one of the devil-fish got them. He gave a strangled cry for help.

The same thought came to Basil almost at the moment and he added his shout to De Brissac’s but the
Gafelborg
remained dead and silent. Not a sign of life showed on board and now, as they leapt forward, they both saw the red of fresh-spilled blood upon her decks by the dark forms of huddled bodies.

With a gasp of relief Deveril reached the ship and flung himself over the rail. Basil was only a moment behind him. De Brissac nearly fell; he could not raise himself sufficiently to reach the deck in his last jump but, slipping, clutched frantically at the ship’s anchor and managed to grab it.

For a moment he hung there suspended by one hand. The movements of the others were restricted by their stilts but Deveril thrust one of his ski-sticks over the side. De Brissac grasped it with his free hand and he was enabled to cling on until the other two could haul him aboard.

From the fo’c’sle head on which they had landed, the foredeck of the
Gafelborg
presented an appalling spectacle. They had all been almost blinded during the last few hundred yards to the ship by their terrific exertions for their own salvation so they had had little opportunity to take in details before. Now they saw that the Negroes from Satan’s Island must have attacked the
Gafelborg
again.

The corpses of half a dozen savages lay in grotesquely contorted attitudes below them on the for’ard well-deck. Great splodges of blood stained the planking near each of them. None of them made the faintest sound or movement, and all had that curious limp look which De Brissac, as an old campaigner, knew well to be an indication that no spark of life remained in their bodies. The pools of blood about them were already congealed, which made it obvious that they had been dead for some time.

With a terrible cry of anguish Basil jumped down into the well-deck and raced aft in search of Unity. Half-stunned by the shock and horror of the scene De Brissac and Deveril followed more slowly. The Frenchman glanced at one of the dead Negroes. The man had a round puncture in his naked breast about which a little cluster of flies was buzzing. It was clear that he had been shot through the heart, yet his throat was cut from ear to ear so that his head was half-severed from his body.

They moved forward to the next and saw that he had been shot at close quarters through the face. An eye was missing and half his cheek was blown away. The carrion flies dispersed from the ghastly wound with an angry buzz then, greed overcoming fear, settled again. The second Negro’s throat was also cut.

Moving forward quickly now, in his anxiety to find out what was happening to Luvia and the rest, De Brissac did not pause to examine the twisted bodies on the port side of the fore-deck. Passing another dead Negro on his way aft he saw that this one had had his throat cut too, but showed no other mortal wound, although his knee-cap had been shot away.

At the entrance to the lounge there were two more big savages; their dead eyes open and protruding horribly as they goggled at the sun. One had been shot through the thigh and the other through the stomach; both their throats gaped open at the neck where they had been slit below the Adam’s apple.

The lounge looked as though a tornado had passed through it. Chairs and tables, previously secured to the deck by swivels, had been torn up and broken; smashed glass littered the floor in all
directions, and a queer, strong perfume of mixed alcoholic spirits mingled with the smell of blood. Three more Negroes were lying dead among the débris; one had been shot but the other two had jagged scalp wounds, which suggested that their heads had been smashed in with bottles. The sad explanation of this
débâcle
they found behind the bar—poor, fat, good-natured Hansie; dead from a dozen wounds, but still clasping an unbroken bottle half full of brandy in his right hand. Evidently he had made a last stand behind his bar using the bottles and glasses it contained with deadly effect upon at least two of his attackers.

Basil came dashing up the companionway. ‘She isn’t there—she isn’t there,’ he cried, his face contorted with anguish. ‘Unity’s cabin’s been wrecked. Those fiends have dragged her off somewhere else and murdered her.’

He suddenly caught sight of Hansie and groaned. ‘Poor old Hansie too. Such a good chap, and there’s that girl he had a child by. He’ll never be able to get back to her now.’

‘I’m afraid he wouldn’t have in any case,’ De Brissac reminded him, ‘but it’s hard when, in another couple of days, he might have been safe ashore on the island. We’d better search the ship to see if we can find the others.’

Basil’s face was white, his hands shaking. ‘For God’s sake give me a drink first. I’m about all-in.’

De Brissac pushed back the sliding shelves behind Hansie’s bar but they disclosed only empty cupboards. ‘Those swine must have looted all the bottles Hansie didn’t smash before they got him,’ he muttered. ‘But here, have a pull at this.’

He stooped and wriggled the bottle of cognac out of Hansie’s dead hand.

Basil laughed hysterically as he took it. ‘Poor old Hansie, his last service, eh, to provide a chap with a tot.’ He gulped down a couple of mouthfuls of the neat brandy and shuddered. De Brissac and Deveril each had a pull at the bottle too; all three of them then proceeded upon their grim inspection.

The door of Unity’s cabin had been broken in and it was empty as Basil had said. Further down the passage they came upon another slaughter. In the broken doorway of Vicente’s cabin lay three more of the Negroes, and all of them had had their throats cut. A fourth body lay across the bunk. It was that of Vicente Vedras, and his skull had been battered in. The door of Synolda’s cabin hung crookedly from one hinge; that also was empty. Smashed furnishings and garments scattered about showed that
a violent struggle had taken place there before she had been dragged out.

Next they went into the old dining-saloon below the lounge, which since their return to the
Gafelborg
after she had been abandoned in the hurricane had been used as a mess by the crew. In it they found the body of Gietto Nudäa, the half-caste seaman, spreadeagled on his back; a native spear thrust right through his body pinned him to the deck.

Appalled by the carnage, and the cloying, sickly scent of blood, they made their way up to the deck again and towards the stern of the ship. Five more Negroes lay there lifeless; wounded in various parts of their bodies and, yet again, a mystery that intrigued the three searchers even in the midst of their horror, the throats of all five blacks were gashed from ear to ear.

Two of them had their gas bladders still strapped to their backs, but under the poop there was a number of balloons tethered, and evidently the Negroes had used that place as a rallying-point at which to disembarrass themselves of their equipment before their final attack upon the centre of the ship. The big, dark, skin envelopes, piled high and hitched together, billowed up like a great stack of sausages.

A visit to the poop-house, where the wounded natives had been quartered after the first attack, disclosed three empty bunks. The two who had died had, De Brissac supposed, been cast into the weed the previous day. There was no trace of the Negro who had received a bullet under the scalp, but the fourth, who had been wounded in the thigh, still lay there. He had been slain by a great gash that gaped open, red and horrible, in his throat. Pints of his blood soaked the sheets and pillow which were dark and stiff; they judged that he had been dead for several hours at least.

Sadly, in grim silence, they made their way to the bridge. Behind the canvas windscreen they found young Largertöf. He had accounted for two more savages before some of the others had succeeded in braining him.

The chart-room was empty. De Brissac, led the way down the steep ladder from it to the captain’s cabin which Luvia had been occupying since they had reboarded the ship.

As the Frenchman stepped on to the deck he gave an exclamation of surprise. Luvia was stretched out in the bunk, carefully tucked up with the sheets neatly folded below his chin.

His head was bandaged and they ran to him, fearing at first
that he, too, was dead, but, to their relief, his heavy breathing soon showed that he was only asleep. With eager hands they tried to rouse him, but he slumbered on utterly unresponsive to their shouts and shakings.

‘What the devil does it mean?’ De Brissac growled. ‘All these blacks, some dead from wounds, but others only winged by bullets, and every single one of them with his throat cut. Now, here is Luvia with, apparently, no more than a rap over the head, dressed in pyjamas, sound asleep in his bunk. It is a riddle in a nightmare.’

‘God knows its answer,’ Basil groaned. ‘But the girls! Where are the girls? We’ve
got
to find them.’

De Brissac already had a shrewd idea what must have happened to them, from their smashed and empty cabins, but he did not like to voice his thoughts before the distracted Basil. They went below again to make a thorough search of the ship. No trace of the girls could be found or any other that would help to clear up the mystery of the cut throats and Luvia’s coma, until they visited the galley. There, curled up on the floor asleep, they discovered Li Foo.

At the first touch he woke and, scrambling to his knees, began to jabber excitedly. He was pathetically glad to see them, but it was a good ten minutes before they could get a coherent account out of him of what had happened.

His version, pieced together, conveyed the main facts. There had been bad trouble two nights before between Luvia and Vicente. The Venezuelan had smashed the Finnish engineer over the head with a water carafe in Synolda’s cabin. The crew, coming on the scene, had endeavoured to seize Vicente, but he had shot the old carpenter Jansen before they had been able to secure him. Luvia, it appeared, had been moody and silent when he came on deck the following morning. He had kept both Synolda and Vicente locked in their cabins, and apart from giving brief orders had spoken to no one except Unity.

In the meantime, after the scrap it seemed that Harlem, knowing Luvia to be out of action, had decided to desert the ship. He had gone off at daybreak with the Negro who had been shot through the scalp, using two more of the balloons that had been left on the ship after the first attack, unobserved by the others until he was a mile away. The day had passed uneventfully although they had been anxious about De Brissac and Basil until they had picked up the signals from the island just before sundown
the previous evening. They had turned in at the usual hour, but Li Foo had been up very early that morning and, in the dawn, had seen at least three hundred Negroes crossing the weed towards the ship. He had roused Luvia and Largertöf in time for them to reach the bridge, but Hansie and Nudäa had been unable to get on deck before the blacks were swarming on board so they had endeavoured to hold the lounge.

Li Foo had no firearm and was cut off on his way to Synolda, but eluded his pursuers and took refuge in the for’ard galley. He witnessed part of the massacre but knew that he would be throwing away his life to no purpose if he went out into the crowd with nothing but his knife. Through the galley skylight he saw the Negroes storm the bridge and Luvia scramble up to the top of the chart-house with his rifle. From there he managed to swing himself on to the ladder of the funnel and climbing to its top perched on it with the whole ship under his view. He shot down a number of the Negroes but some of them had spears and one hurled with good aim caught him on the head and knocked him backwards so that he fell down inside the funnel.

Li Foo had succeeded in saving himself by wrenching out the plate of the galley ventilator, climbing up into it, and remaining there while the savages looted the ship. When all was quiet again he had crawled out and watched them hopping along half-way to their island with the two girls, balloons strapped to their backs, being carried away as prisoners amongst them. On the decks they had left a number of their dead and all those who were too seriously wounded to be helped across the weed. Li Foo had gone round conscientiously and carefully slitting the throats of every black on board, dead or alive, to make quite certain of them.

It had occurred to him that every ship’s funnel had struts across its interior to strengthen it and hold its sections firmly in place. There was a chance that Luvia had been caught on one of these and could not get up or down. Climbing the funnel ladder Li Foo had found his officer lying doubled up across one of the struts. The spear had knocked him out but he was still very much alive by the time Li Foo had managed to get a bowline round his body and haul him up. The Chinaman had tried to persuade him to go to bed but he was in such a state of excited despair about the women that he flatly refused. Seeing him shivering and exhausted the cunning Li Foo had suggested a hot grog and doctored
the drink with a strong dose of smuggled opium. It sent him off very soon after he had swallowed it. The Chinaman had then undressed his officer, washed him, rebandaged his head, and put him to bed.