On their left was a low tongue of sandy beach and within it a tidal marsh. Soon on his left he saw another land mass on which appeared a cupola topped house, a church, and other scattered houses with weedy yards, all silent and devoid of life. The water passage to this deserted village was choked with reeds of the salt marsh.
They soon passed it, following a winding channel.
“There’s Shell Castle,” one seaman named Brannigan pointed.
Helmuth gave a start. Was this the shadowy Shell Castle he had heard rumors of in dockside taverns?
CHAPTER 3.
Shell Castle
Helmuth’s fanciful visualization of Shell Castle as a settlement in grandiose Victorian Gothic was short-lived and shattered by the grim reality. The steamer now moved dead slow towards a mediocre spectacle. This was a series of ancient, unpainted, weathered-looking frame buildings on high, barnacle-encrusted, slimy pilings interconnected by elevated wharves and boardwalks, all situated on a shoal roughly half a mile in length and about 60 feet wide; a shoal formed by huge piles of bleached oyster shells. A depressing atmosphere of impoverishment hung over the entire vista.
He identified the usage of a number of the structures: there were two residences, a store, ship chandlery, tavern, grist mill, warehouses of the type called “fish houses,” and several rain cisterns. The biggest buildings were the fish houses, some 300 feet long.
To his question, Carrick answered the place was “dry at low water.” As the steamer docked he watched some local fishermen delivering their catch from their little fishing boats at one of the fish houses. And he decided such commercial activity must be in part a “cover” for the pirate who owned all of the buildings on Shell Castle. At one place beneath the dismal installation was an empty dry dock.
The second mate stood almost at Helmuth’s elbow. “Where,” Helmuth addressed Garrick, “do they get calling this sad collection of rotting country barns and fishing shanties a ‘castle?’ All I see is the moat,” here indicating the surrounding water.
“Mister,” the second mate unperturbedly looked at him, “have you ever been to Charlestown harbor? There they have only a tidal shoal they call Castle Pinckney; here we do have a whole island.”
Mate Wragge barked an order at the second mate, seemingly irritated at the latter’s brief fraternization with Helmuth. The second mate in turn shouted orders for several seamen to cast mooring lines to men waiting on the wharf. As the steamer bumped gently against the pilings, Helmuth discerned a wheeled howitzer covered by sailcloth on another wharf jutting out from the main boardwalk; and at a little distance another such canvas-covered object showed.
Once the gangplank was run in, Helmuth found himself ordered along with the others to unload the steamer’s cargo. As he stevedored a sack of coffee ashore, he saw a lone sailor remove one, then another, of the black plates hinged on either side of the bow, and what they had concealed was the ship’s name: Rook. Helmuth was faintly amused by the symbolism, for in chess a rook was also called a castle.
At sundown Helmuth followed the steamer’s crew to one of the old fish houses, now partially converted into a bunkhouse and mess hall, though it still did duty also as a warehouse (containing some hogsheads of sugar, cotton bales and bags of cocoa). There they consumed a supper of fish chowder, corn bread and coffee. Carrick mildly grumbled to his immediate neighbors about the meal.
The Irishman stopped his grievances upon hearing a steam whistle, got up from the table and went out the door, followed by the others. Helmuth went after them, and saw docking the side wheeler they had spoken to off Cape Hatteras. Towed behind her in the foaming wake, the astonished detective saw a ghost resurrected from the past; an oval metal deck whose green algae shroud stirred with every sea that washed over her low deck, the vessel being topped with an aged and battered turret similarly festooned with seaweed. She was the original Monitor sunk over two decades ago off Cape Hatteras!
As a puffing donkey engine pulled her up the rails into dry dock, the sailors grumbled that she meant hard work tomorrow. Mate Wragge grabbed Helmuth by the arm: “Captain Thatcher wants to see you!”
* * * *
They entered one of the buildings serving as Thatcher’s residence and into what was called his office. The floor was parquet, of polished pine and oak in a chessboard pattern, Helmuth perceived. The mauve draperies, the scattered small but thick oriental rugs, the odd conglomeration of red leather settees, mahogany Windsor chairs, cherrywood colonial buffet, bamboo Chinese end tables, various gaudy oil paintings of reclining nude women, harvest and hunting scenes: all bespoke their original place—the bar-lounges of ocean-going ships. There was an utter lack of discriminating choice, a disregard of harmony in style or color scheme, as if the owner were a nouveau riche with the pretentiousness of being cultured, of making an ignorant display of what his sudden wealth could buy.
In a bookcase behind Thatcher were the same incongruities of taste: Plutarch’s Lives cheek by jowl with insipid Victorian novels, Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler next to von Clausewitz’ treatise on war. But he forgot his perusal when he spied over the bookcase one drape pulled back to reveal an opened wall safe. In there were the answers to many mysteries, possibly including the haunting familiarity about Thatcher that Helmuth could not decipher.
Thatcher looked up from his desk and brusquely inquired what Helmuth knew of the swivel mechanism of Monitor class warships. Because he was startled at the mention of warships, Helmuth faltered in his speech as he replied he had no prior experience with them. But he felt his mechanical ability should enable him to figure it out.
“Good,” snapped Thatcher. “Tomorrow I’m assigning you to work on the one we towed in tonight.”
“What’ll it be used for?” The question slipped out before Helmuth could think.
“Salvage is legal, mister,” growled Thatcher. “But it’s none of your business.”
* * * *
The next morning, literally a horde of men descended upon the Monitor—the entire crews of the Rook and the small paddle-wheel steamer. A deck gang scrubbed away the slime on the deck and turret; inside a bucket brigade passed up the accumulation of sand swallowed by the wreck. Several skeletons were resurrected and tossed upon the dank oyster shell island amid superstitious mutterings from a few sailors that the discovery made the Monitor a “jonah.”
The ships’ carpenters hammered away on the gun carriage in the turret; hidden below the aft deck came the metallic clanging of the engineers working on the steam boilers. To this was now added the racket of barnacle and rust scraping.
Into this din of noise Helmuth descended below the turret where he began his inspection of the small steam engine and the double train of cog-wheels it drove, connected with the vertical axle of the turret, then the bronze bearing of this axle. Most of the turning gear looked hopelessly rusted; the two guns were corroded and pitted, and he doubted if they could safely take any firing before bursting among their gun crews, unless protective iron bands were heat shrunk around the breech; but that problem had not been given him by Thatcher. The hazardous condition of the guns made him ponder again just what Thatcher intended to use the Monitor for.
Having made his survey of the work involved on the swivel mechanism, Helmuth emerged on the deck, wiping sweat from his face, looking for one of the Rook’s officers. In the shade beneath the buildings he saw a small skiff, bottom up, with the obvious signs of interrupted seam caulking. Through a ring in her bow passed a padlocked chain that encircled a nearby piling. When the time came to escape, that might be his means. Then he glimpsed the second mate, called to him, and explained his need for certain tools.
The ship chandlery to which he was sent contained the usual miscellany of marine gear and general store items. While the chandler assembled his tools, Helmuth searched with his eyes until he located the rifle case; like the skiff, a padlocked chain secured the rifles.
Helmuth had struggled for three days trying to unfreeze the swivel gears. When he stopped in his frustration he found another annoyance. Though the Monitor had been scrubbed clean of algae, the hot sun baking its iron plates steamed up a miasma and reek of decay; there was still rotting algae in hidden places below that the heat was causing to putrefy.
Hearing loud shouting outside, he climbed up from the hold, into the turret, and out on deck. Shimmering heat waves hung over the sun-blistering deck. A crowd of sailors had stopped their work and ringed two fighting men whom they encouraged lustily.
Mate Samuel Wragge jumped down from the wharf with a drawn pistol, and shoving aside part of the crowd, snarled: “You two Irishers quit now or I’ll blow both your heads off.” Then to the crowd, “And the rest of you—get this hulk ship-shape.”
Carrick came into the turret wiping blood from his nose.
“What was that all about?” Helmuth asked.
“Because I just told Brannigan I came from a different part of Ireland than him, he started a fight,” he seemed good-naturedly amused by it. “He said I was shanty-Irish.”
Helmuth shook his head, perplexed at the too easy-going Irishman, then froze. “Only the ship’s officers carry arms?”
“Think they trust us with a gun? Most of us are impressed seamen from ships they robbed.”
As Helmuth resumed his work, he mulled over taking Carrick into his confidence, disclosing his identity and mission; but after some debate with himself, he hesitated. The risk was too great. What if the Irishman’s friendliness was a ruse to spy on him?
* * * *
During the daylight hours while they worked on the wreck, Helmuth would see Peter Greene doing sentry duty in the installation’s only cupola—a square structure with a weather cock on its peak, the whole atop a fish house. Greene scanned the watery approaches to Shell Castle but never with a telescope.
One afternoon he blew a signal on a fog horn. Helmuth searched the sky’s rim. Rarely were definite clouds ever seen; he could see none now. Only in the early morning was any blue in the heavens; at present he looked into a bronze sky—hot, sultry and glaring. In a while a ship did float phantom like out of the shimmering, burnished metallic horizon and signaled for the pilot to come out and guide her in.
Before the pilot had departed, the Rook’s officers had appeared at the sound of the horn, barking orders for sail cloth to be spread over the Monitor. When the ship docked, Helmuth and the others unloaded her cargo. To the inquisitive merchant captain, Mate Wragge explained that under the sail cloth was a secret invention of Thatcher’s, and gave a confidential wink.
Nudging Carrick, Helmuth asked, “Do you think this old wreck really is part of an invention?”
Carrick shook his head. “The old salt’s figure he salvaged her for refitting and then sale to some banana republic in South America.”
The next time as they passed one another, Helmuth carrying a bag of cocoa and Carrick going for his next burden, the detective spoke again. “Loan me, for a couple of days, those binoculars you found.”
“Sure.”
In the morning when Peter Greene warned of another incoming trade ship, Helmuth unbuttoned his shirt, under which he had hidden the binoculars slung by a leather strap around his neck. Focusing them, all he found in the direction Peter Greene stared at was only empty rolling seas.
The glasses ruled out hypersensitive vision; but how else did he see—or know!—a ship was there? Helmuth slowly began to realize that here was the key to Thatcher’s incredible luck in never being caught by a warship. Greene possessed some secret, fantastic ability of visual perception.
That evening after their usual fish chowder supper, Helmuth enjoyed a cigar, for contraband tobacco was one of the occasionally doled out “shares.” He gazed below where the Monitor’s skeletons still lay grotesquely heaped.
An old man with a drooping walrus mustache, whom he saw do only light chores on the steamer, requested a match for his pipe. After a few preliminary, trivial remarks, and introducing himself as Curtis Cromwell, he launched into conversation prompted by a rum-loosened tongue.
“Before I went to sea, I used to be a well digger and a water diviner. But I took to drink—and that ruined it; I lost my touch with the forked stick until my body dried out from liquor. But I’d get tempted again, and drink, and couldn’t ‘smell’ water for a long time again.”
“Where’s Peter Greene come from?” Helmuth decided to take advantage of his talkative mood.
“Him? He’s from Tristan da Cunha. He’s clever. He’s a nauscopist.”
The man rambled on about something else but Helmuth was unhearing, for he was intrigued by the term “nauscopist” and analyzed it in his mind. “Scope” came from the Greek “skopes” for “watcher;” and “naus” was Greek for “ship.” He gave a start.
“Did Greene ever tell you how he learned to see ships from a distance?”
“Oh yes. He learned it from an old resident on the island of Mauritius, who in turn had been taught by a French lighthouse keeper named Bottineau. He told me it’s an effect in the atmosphere on the horizon which has signs telling the approach of a ship, or if on a ship, the approach of a landfall. He tried to teach me, but I’m not an educated man and couldn’t learn.”
Helmuth held back his astonishment. Cromwell’s conversation became increasingly incoherent and rambling, frustrating Helmuth’s attempts to pry more explanations from him.
* * * *
The seventh morning of work on the Monitor Helmuth made his second appearance at the ship chandlery. While awaiting his turn, he heard yelling and a shot, then a confusion of voices. The chandler and the man he had been waiting on both ran out the door, curious about the uproar. Helmuth scanned swiftly the store’s interior, trying to decide how to take advantage of this chance. Guns were out of the question at this time. But a nearby pile of navigational charts was suggestive.
Quickly he leafed through them till he had one of the Outer Banks and the Sound. What Carrick called the “swash”—the water between the Sound and the ocean and the islands of Ocracoke and Portsmouth—was, except for the three narrow channels threading it, a very shallow water, ranging from dry sand in places at low tide to waist high depth at high tide. The Sound itself was a large watery waste and according to Carrick subject to treacherous high waves in a storm wind. He would need better than that small skiff to cross the Sound; and as he looked at Ocracoke village on the chart, an idea formed in his mind.
The hubbub outside having died down, Helmuth let go the charts and walked to the door. The chandler and his customer returned. On the wharf, Mate Wragge talked to an excited-looking trading ship captain.
Carrick was waiting for him when Helmuth carried his hardware aboard the Monitor. The Irishman spoke softly. “Wragge just shot and killed one of our impressed seamen. I guess you know?”
“Not entirely.”
“The man jumped aboard that trader, yelling he was being held here against his will by pirates. The mate gunned him down in cold blood. Know how he explained it to the trader? Said the sailor had been on laudanum for some time and had delusions and sometimes got violent. And this time he had to shoot him before the so-called madman could attack anyone.”
That evening Cromwell appeared intoxicated again so Helmuth guided the conversation of trivia around to the past of Shell Castle.
“You probably saw some of these older fish houses have holes cut in their flooring,” began Cromwell. “That’s where they dumped empty oyster shells after shucking, directly into the water. After all these years the shells built a solid surface atop the shoal that’s only wet at high tide now. Which is how the place got its name I hear.
“It had been a trading center from 1790 to 1814 when the channel through the inlet shoaled-up and ruined its value. In the 1870’s Captain Thatcher bought the deed,
dredged the channel and repaired the buildings.
“He made it a shipping and trading center again and opened a ship chandlery. The local fishermen brought their catch of oysters, shad and mullet to its fish houses, which became the cargo of ocean-going ships; who themselves unloaded a barter cargo that could only be transported by lighters, scows and flatboats that could venture into the shallow Sound and rivers of the mainland. And because Captain Thatcher was acquainted with the peculiar navigational problems of Ocracoke swash, he pretty well controlled pilotage through it too, besides providing cargo lighters.
“During the time of rebuilding Shell Castle, Thatcher had lived in Ocracoke village, as the installation’s old buildings were full of drafts and storm-damp due to the many crevices between its frame timbers. Then—no one knew why—when he settled in his new quarters at Shell Castle, he changed his name from some other one to what it is now: ‘Thatcher.’”
“What had been his name?”
“What it had been previously I don’t know. Besides, you don’t ask questions like that around here.”
The trading center aspect of Shell Castle, thought Helmut, also provided the safe means of disposing of looted cargo under guise of barter goods.
Cromwell went to explain that the abandoned village of Portsmouth was linked with Shell Castle back in post-Revolutionary times for the swash pilots once lived there. Now it was empty save for the transient population of fishermen who assumed squatters rights among the old houses during the winter when they tonged for oysters from small skiffs, transferring their catch to a “buy-boat.” In the summertime it reverted to a ghost town of ownerless, empty buildings.
“This here place in general goes back even before the Revolution,” continued Cromwell. “Why, do you know that Blackbeard the pirate lived in Ocracoke village and was killed in a sea fight in the swash in 1718?”
What an odd coincidence—or was it a deliberate act—that Thatcher, like Blackbeard, discovered the strategic position of this place as a hidden base a stone’s throw from the shipping lanes that both preyed upon?
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel Page 13