Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans)

by Richard Chizmar

  I should have let it go at that—smiled, gathered up my magazine, and scurried off. Had we still been ashore, I might have done so. I’ve always been bolder once I’ve lost sight of land, though, and the chance to speak to the professor was too great an opportunity to let pass. “At least they share your disdain for Baglioni’s theories on Atlantis,” I offered, far too brightly.

  “Those imbeciles deserve no plaudits for rejecting Baglioni’s fantasies,” Thaxton said. “There are foods so indigestible that even a starving rat would refuse them, but that’s no reason to mistake the rodent for a gourmet.” He gestured at the Scientific Alarums, dismissing it with the sweep of one grease-blotched hand. “Find something more substantial with which to better yourself, or at least something worthy to be trampled over. Even the flies deserve more substance from their doom than that rag offers.”

  Some element of that last pronouncement brought the professor up short, and whatever part of his intellect I had momentarily distracted, turned back to other, more weighty matters. As he stomped off deeper into the ship, he was muttering darkly to himself about things part of me wishes were still a mystery.

  * * *

  My assignment to the Chelston had been an unwelcome surprise. For a time after I got the orders, I wondered what I’d done to earn the Admiralty’s scorn. The notification arrived on the heels of them rejecting me as automaton artificer on the Terra Nova. Instead of manning Scott’s supply vessel for the First British Airship Antarctic Expedition, I would be stuck on a refitted lumber hauler bound for the Atlantic, under the command of a man notorious for losing a revolutionary self-directed and, as it turned out, homicidal clockwork policeman on London back in ’03—or staging a clever deception to that effect in order to cover for the misdeeds of a friend at Scotland Yard, if you believed his critics on Fleet Street and in the British learned societies. Excited as I was about the prospect of meeting Professor Thaxton, his mission promised to be rather less glamorous than the race to establish the first permanent airbase at the Pole. In fact, it sounded a bit absurd, as all his exploits were wont to do at the start.

  A disagreement over the fate of Atlantis between the professor and a marine biologist by the name of Baglioni, had set the whole thing in motion. Thaxton’s plan was for a quartet of ships to trawl the waters northwest of Cape Juba, off the Continental Slope, using reinforced cranes and modified diving bells to bring up artifacts that he guaranteed would establish the truth about the fabled lost continent. Or at least disprove the theories put forth by Bory de Saint Vincent in 1803 and, most recently, Doctor Rupert Baglioni, which cite volcanic eruptions as the cause for Atlantis’s demise and identify the Canaries, Madeiras, and Azores as its remnants. It was the promise of those artifacts, their potential scientific and, of course, financial value that drew bids of support for the expedition from both public and private sources.

  Our government seemed enthusiastic about the venture, which was a surprise given their skirmishes with the professor over the years. No one could accuse Thaxton of being disloyal to the Crown, but he did not always share the War Office’s notion that all scientific research should have an obvious utilitarian, martial goal. His grail was truth, no matter its usefulness, no matter the consequences of its achievement, and he’d been quite vocal in the past about resources directed to the military that might have instead bolstered his operations. Most famously, he’d told Lord Kitchener and the Committee of Imperial and Colonial Defense: “There was much Plato got wrong, but he was spot on when he identified ignorance as the root and stem of all evils, a blighted class which, of course, includes war. Conquer ignorance and you lot would be out of a job in a fortnight.”

  Still, when news of the proposed expedition hit the papers and the Royal Societies announced their support, the Admiralty was right there with a promise of several noted specialists—geologists, meteorologists, and the like—to assist the professor, as well as a score of nameless, less noteworthy sailors, such as myself, to man the lower decks. Thaxton took them up on the promise of engine room and automaton artificers, along with mechanical stokers for each of the four ships, but rejected the specialists on the grounds that he himself could provide whatever scientific expertise the mission required. If the Sea Lords took offense at that slight, they did not voice their anger, at least in public.

  The press hounded both camps for a time, hoping to stir up the sort of ever-escalating row for which the professor was notorious, but no one rose to the bait. By the time we set sail, Fleet Street had turned its attention to the latest in a yearlong string of bombings and bloody assassinations across London. A few of the more radical journalists claimed that the chaos was the work of an apocalypse cult hurrying along the end of the world, but most of the papers pinned the terrorist activity on a boogeyman suited to their readers’ tastes: French or Russian spies, any of a dozen homegrown anarchist groups, or immigrants of one race or another. The consensus held that the terror was meant to disrupt the start of the Festival of Empire. If that was the intent, the scheme failed. The opening at the Crystal Palace, scheduled for the night of our departure, went off without a hitch. There were fireworks over London as we set sail, but they were not for us.

  I cannot speak to the mood aboard the other three freighters in our little group, but the Chelston was a grim place indeed. A decade waiting for a seemingly inevitable war with the French and the Russians—sitzkreig, as our allies in Berlin call it—had left most of the career sailors dispirited. At the outset of our expedition, a few of the engine room artificers tried to build up a camaraderie around increasingly rude jokes about the mermaids Thaxton was going to haul back for the London Zoo. There was no way such feeble efforts could compensate for the generally sour mood, and the way in which the crew had been assembled. Sailors were arriving from all over the fleet right up until we cast off, so everyone was left to size up the men working around them even as they tried to get their bearings on the officers’ expectations and the ship’s routines. That’s a certain course to mistrust, just as the secrecy shrouding large parts of the mission guaranteed a steady swirl of rumors. Logic proved even more useless than usual against this shipboard gossip because the professor’s past exploits lent even the most fantastic yarns an air of credibility. In some cases, the truth proved stranger than the speculation.

  Take the rumors about the phantom passengers. Such tales are common enough when a crew is patched together on a new vessel, and the civilians on board aren’t experienced enough to avoid getting lost below deck. Someone glances up from a duty to see an unfamiliar person wandering past, somewhere he shouldn’t ever be, and they assume it’s a stowaway. After a telling or two, it’s a damned spirit prowling for revenge. The first week out, the Chelston was full of chatter about such things. I myself thought I’d seen some oddly dressed men creep onto the ship the night before we left, but let it go as a trick of the fog after the officer stationed on deck told me that no one had come aboard for an hour or more. Others said they’d heard eerie chanting rising from a part of the hold off limits to everyone save Thaxton. Fear of the professor’s wrath prevented us from venturing down there to settle the matter.

  It turned out that there really were a dozen men lurking in the Chelston’s hold: cultists, like the ones described in the radical papers. It was only when we’d sighted the African coast that the truth about them was revealed, at least a small part of it. Their leader was a smirking New Englander by the name of Marsh who dressed in the robes of an ancient Persian priest. I was on deck delivering a message from the chief artificer to one of the petty officers when Marsh led his people up from the hold. They took positions around the ship, praying in a language none of us recognized, as if to sanctify the work being done by the sailors and the automatons. The ministrations were not well received. The men—those not frightened by the sudden appearance of the rumored phantoms, anyway—made their unhappiness known with sharp elbows and sharper words whenever the chance arose.

  It was then that Thaxton arri
ved, rushing down from the bridge. I expected him to grab the nearest cultist and pitch him overboard, but instead he roared at the sailors he passed, “Eyes to your work! Leave the priests to their business!”

  Marsh soon fell into step with the professor. He walked not in his wake but at his side, an equal. Even the captain had not managed that feat in the days we’d been at sea. As they strode toward a hatchway, Marsh drew a thick, tattered book from the satchel slung at his hip and offered it to Thaxton, who waved it away. They were right in front of me then. The look on the professor’s face was positively demonic. His eyes were wild, his teeth clenched in a mad grin.

  Reeling with disbelief, I watched them disappear into the ship. I couldn’t understand it. We were finally in position, readying the equipment for its first pass of the ocean floor. There could hardly have been a worse time to unleash this lot of mumbling mystics.

  I wasn’t the only one baffled by the professor’s actions. In something of a haze, I delivered the message from the chief artificer, then made my way down to grab a meal, before I took on the afternoon watch over the automatic stokers. When I got to the galley, I found it humming with confusion and concern about the morning’s events. I lingered in the passageway, wondering if I could stomach the uninformed speculation.

  “I’m having second thoughts about going in there, too,” said someone at my shoulder. The femininity of the voice was something of a surprise. The compulsory universal service laws hadn’t been enacted yet, mind you, so distaff sailors were still a rarity in the fleet.

  I turned to find myself facing the only woman aboard the Chelston, and the only reporter who had ever gained Thaxton’s trust. “I wouldn’t let the cook hear you say such things, Miss Hayes, ma’am,” I noted. “He might take it as a comment on his skills, whether you meant it as such or not. After that, you wouldn’t want to eat anything he’d serve you for the rest of this trip.”

  She tried to muster a laugh at that, but the result was less than convincing. It seemed that the concerns plaguing me, or some variation thereof, had her by the throat, too. As I took in her worried look, I found myself staring at the scars on her face and the reflective circles of her goggles, the sure signs of a former ether addict. Awkwardly I forced myself to look away. She ignored my discomfort and invited me to join her in the galley. Soon enough we were sitting together at the end of one of the metal trestle tables.

  Darcy Hayes was as far from my notion of a pressman as Thaxton was from my notion of a scholar. My uncle wrote for the Cornish Post and Mining News, but he was a tweedy sort, bright and conscientious, and not terribly interested in anything adventurous, or even out of the ordinary. Not at all like the ambitious London rumormongers you hear about, slinking around after indiscreet politicians and harrying crime victims, then rushing back to Fleet Street with their latest scoop. Not at all like Darcy Hayes. She was a stringer for one of the most aggressive of the radical papers, Uncommon Sense. I could see right away why Thaxton trusted her. There was a brashness about the woman, a cheerful insolence that let you know she disdained guile. Some former aether junkies hid their scars with makeup, but she left them alone, even the blackened tip of her nose. The ugly mark suggested that her use of the distilled element had been prodigious. Without the dark goggles, she probably couldn’t even see the mundane world anymore.

  It was impossible not to catch fragments of the conversations going on around us. A few of the sailors hushed their voices to whispers in deference of Hayes, but many simply blurted out their opinions of the mission and Thaxton and, most pointedly, the strange priests.

  “You’re getting this as a proxy,” I explained after the men nearest us left the table, grumbling and casting baleful looks back at Hayes. “They wouldn’t dare speak so bluntly around the senior officers and they’re frightened of the professor.”

  “Oh, this is nothing new. I’ve had respectable men, titled old codgers and the leaders of venerable societies, hurl insults my way that would make the saltiest seadog blush. Their anger’s got little to do with me, though.” She sighed and sipped her coffee. “They wouldn’t know me from Eve, except for my association with Thaxton. But they aim their venom my way because they all understand that he’d brain them if they so much as looked at him cockeyed.”

  “I’ve read about those incidents.”

  “Don’t believe everything printed in the newspapers,” she said archly. “Anyway, if you’re worried that I’m going to report your mates, don’t be. I usually just allow his critics to have their say and let it go at that. No need to get him riled up about the buzzing of gnats. That’s not to say your shipmates are gnats.”

  “When you’re around Thaxton, it’s hard not to feel like one. I ran into him below deck the other day.” I held up my still-bruised hand. “The other marks are less visible.”

  “You should have seen me after my first meeting with him.” That memory lightened Hayes’s mood considerably, and she seemed to shake off whatever had been troubling her. “Look,” she said, “I understand why everyone is so concerned. Those priests were a surprise to me, too. But they must have a purpose for the expedition, even if we can’t see what it is just yet.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “Members of a Yank religious cult that’s been predicting the imminent end of the world since Fashoda set us on the brink of war with France. My editor thinks they’re linked to all the trouble the lapdog press has been pinning on free thinkers and immigrants. Their leader’s a nasty piece of work. Involved in some weird doings on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m guessing that book he’s lugging about contains some information Thaxton needs for the search.”

  It seemed reasonable enough on the surface, but if you plumbed the depths of the hypothesis at all, it sounded wrong. “You know the professor better than I do, but after all he’s been quoted as saying about superstition, it seems to me that he’d just call the cultists dunderheads before snatching the book from their altar, if he thought it held some knowledge worth preserving. It’s not like he’s tolerant of ideas that contradict his. Look at the way he went after Doctor Baglioni for saying that volcanoes might have sunk Atlantis in his lecture on—what was it again: the morphology of the squid?”

  “That’s right.” Hayes didn’t give me the look of surprise I often get when I mention some obscure fact I’ve picked up from my reading, but I could tell she was recasting her opinion of me. “I can guess now why you know so much about the professor: You read the science press.”

  “The Baglioni lecture was written up in the news section of Beyond Nature, though other places picked up the story of Professor Thaxton bursting in from the wings and shouting him off the stage after the Atlantis comment. What I’ve never quite been able to figure out is how Baglioni ended up as the nemesis on the other side of this debate. The lecture was supposed to be his last before retirement. As far as I can tell, he’d never written about Atlantis before. He’s a biologist.”

  “And a tough old mummy,” Hayes added. “Not Thaxton’s equal, of course. Then again, few are.”

  It was time for me to report back to the engine room. Hayes offered me her hand, transparent, aether-blighted fingernails and all, as we left the galley. “It’s no good trying to second-guess Thaxton on any of this,” she said, grinning. “It’s not just that he’s blazing new trails. He’s blazing them across locales not found on any maps. We’ll just have to see where we end up.”

  “What if those trails take us somewhere we don’t want to go?”

  Hayes’s smile wavered just a little. “That’s not really something to worry about,” she said. “It’s not like we can stop Thaxton from taking us all with him, once he’s set his mind on a destination.”

  * * *

  The diving bells the professor created for the expedition were remarkable things. They boasted echo-mapping systems decades ahead of the crude submerged sounding devices that were in use at the time around lighthouses, with hydrophones and noise filters that allowed them to sen
d back clear reports of the seabed. Each bell also housed two guns capable of firing six belt-fed torpedoes apiece. The torpedoes were tipped with powerful magnets and attached to spools of heavy wire of a wholly original and incredibly strong alloy. Like the professor’s infamous clockwork policeman prototype, the bells and torpedoes possessed a capability for self-direction and independence far beyond the most advanced mechanical constructs of the time.

  The controversy surrounding the expedition’s outcome has overshadowed the astonishing nature of these inventions, and some of his colleagues still deny Thaxton his due for their innovations. That’s no surprise, really. All the bells used for the mission remain shattered and sunk at the bottom of the Atlantic. There were no spares, no back-ups. The professor has refused to release any information about them directly through the usual scientific publications, instead spreading the knowledge through a network of likeminded and similarly reckless truth-seekers. He’s filed no patents, demanded no payments—though several braggarts falsely claiming credit for some facet of the inventions have found themselves battered and bullied into publicly acknowledging their deceptions.

  It’s a shame the original bells were lost. They were magnificent. I saw them up close, saw them in action. Once the mapping maneuvers started in earnest, many of us took shifts away from our regular stations to support the operations on deck. Apart from Thaxton’s marvels, the search phase itself was tedious. For more than a week, our group trawled in patterns dictated by the professor, who commanded all from the Chelston. He refused to supervise from the bridge. It was, he said, too removed from the actual work being done. He had the captain set up a station for him on the deck. In the final days before the discovery, he was a fixed point around which moved a scrum of men and equipment.