The doom-saying Americans lingered at the edges of this Thaxton-centric system. Their leader, on the other hand, tried to position himself close by the professor’s side. Marsh was an inconsistent presence, sometimes forced away by sailors repositioning a bank of sensors, sometimes by the need speak quietly to one of his countrymen. When he managed to stay close, he created an uncomfortable juxtaposition. One moment the professor would call out sounding data for Hayes to enter into the meticulously maintained logs. The next, Marsh would crack open his moldy old book and croak out a prayer for his followers to ape back at him in ragged, broken chorus. Not even the most devout of the zealots could keep up with the professor, though. The Americans required sleep, where Thaxton, apparently, did not.
Ideal weather and a calm sea greeted us the day the search ended, all out of line with the unreal events that marked its close. We only knew that something unusual was going on when the ships were ordered to full stop, and the wireless was relocated to the professor’s command post. My duty station was close enough to Thaxton that I could hear his growled orders and the glow bug repeating them to the other vessels. Throughout the afternoon, messages flew back and forth, choreographing a series of complex maneuvers to position the bells. Once they were in place, they largely directed themselves in firing their torpedoes, which in turn swam incredibly elaborate routes to ensnare the object of our quest.
Hour after hour, the work dragged on. The priests were hoarse from their chanting, the crew weary and tense before the maneuvers were complete, and the torpedoes had each locked onto a bell with its powerful magnet. By the time Thaxton finally gave the order to raise the prize, the sun had sunk to the horizon. Its dying light washed the world in stunning reds and golds.
All except for the thing we hauled up from the depths.
It emerged from the water between the four ships, pulled up by the groaning cranes and supported on a net of alloy wires strung between the diving bells. At first, it appeared to be a gigantic column resting on its side. The more of the thing that rose above the waves, the more it became clear that it was not some remnant of a lost architectural wonder, but rather something organic. Not a whale. Not a giant squid or octopus. No, we had snared a single, gargantuan tentacle, and it reeked like all the charnel houses and killing floors in England flushed out at once. Its surface was the pale white of old death. No light from the sunset lingered upon it. Or perhaps the sunlight vanished into its blotchy bulk. Looking at it was like looking into nothing, the Void made manifest.
The initial cheers of triumph fell silent, and a dread settled over the ship as pernicious as the stink from our prize. The cultists dropped to their knees, screaming praise to the ancient thing from the sea. Some of my crewmates dropped to their knees as well, but their prayers were directed at younger gods and prophets.
“You shall be exalted for this, Professor,” Marsh crowed. “Your name shall be legend among the faithful. You have proved the existence of the Dreaming One!”
Thaxton had been looking out at the ghastly white limb. Now he turned. The demonic grimace was gone. In its place was a snarl of utter disdain. “Yes, I’ve proved the thing you worship exists.” He lunged at the American and clouted him in the ear. The priestly headpiece that Marsh wore tumbled to the deck. “I’ve wanted to strike that blow since I first heard of the schemes you and your idiot followers have undertaken in the name of that bloated corpse—the murders and the chaos you’ve sown. I’ve wanted to do worse since I first set eyes on you, you howling buffoon. You have no idea how much self-control it takes me to hold off bashing in your brain-deprived skull every second I’m near you.”
Marsh pointed to the creature. “That is the doom of Atlantis. You have proved it to be so. Now it will be the doom of England and France and the rest of the corrupt Old World!”
“That thing has no power over England. England has science and reason. With those tools, and my intellect, I’ve pulled that beast up into the daylight. Look at it. The object of your worship is a thing of flesh and blood.” Thaxton strode forward to loom over the cringing mystic, and through his speaking box he declared, “Since it is flesh and blood, it can be destroyed. Watch.”
As the professor turned to give a command, Marsh scrambled away. He dropped to all fours, scuttled beneath one of the command post tables, and got to his feet on the other side, near where Miss Hayes was standing. There he held up the ancient tome from which he’d recited his prayers. “With this I have seen the things that dwell beyond the rational world,” he said. “The feeble constructs of your science and reason cannot stand against their coming.”
Marsh shoved the reporter aside and grabbed whatever logbooks and charts he could hold. Crushing them and his own book to his chest, he turned for the rail. Hayes was on his heels in an instant, a dirk in her hand, but it was I who tackled the priest—or rather, who knocked most of the books and papers from his grasp before he went over the side.
As for what happened next, the official reports claim that one of the cranes on the Caria gave way, so that the massive, lifeless object shifted awkwardly in the net. A crane on the Chelston followed suit. Then the explosives inside the bells and the torpedoes went off, as Thaxton had ordered, and it was all over. The unidentified salvage blew apart and sank back into the Atlantic.
I recall those moments differently. No sooner had Marsh gone overboard than the entire ship lurched heavily to starboard. The air was filled with the blare of klaxons warning of the impending explosion, but also the teeth-gritting whine of metal twisting and the roar of sudden waves pounding the hull. The deck tilted madly. I fell upon the logs and papers, and Marsh’s old book, pressing them beneath me to stop them from sliding away. The angle of the deck was so great that, for a moment, I had a clear view of the weird prize in our net. Contrary to what the reports claimed, it did not simply lay there, lifeless. It flexed and pulled down with tremendous force. Only then did the cranes and cables give way, just before the explosives went off. Then something—some tool or piece of equipment from the commend center not properly secured—crashed into my skull.
I was gazing at the thing when unconsciousness took me. The whiteness of it drew me in, swallowed me and pulled me down with it to the bottom of the ocean. There I floated, aware of terrible shapes, aspects of an ancient being’s form that emerged from the surrounding darkness and then dissipated: a body like a bloated, scaly dragon; rudimentary wings; a pulpy head with a muzzle of tentacles that stretched along the floor of more than one ocean, a single strand of which Thaxton had pulled to the surface. I saw then that the beast lay sleeping among the submerged ruins of not just Atlantis, but all the great cities of mankind that ever were and ever would be. Its bed comprised their buildings and the bones of countless generations. My hands began to burn, and then my arms and my chest. I tried to hold back the shriek of pain, fearful that any sound would draw its attention, but I failed. The sound of my scream was the color of the beast. No sooner had the cry been uttered than the whiteness turned on me and took me into its smothering embrace.
They tell me that I was still screaming when they got me to the sickbay, where I was sedated, and the books and papers finally pried from my grasp. The steward bandaged the scorched skin of my hands, arms, and chest. No cause was ever offered for the burns. They healed before we reached port, so the wounds rate no mention in the reports generated by the doctors on shore.
All four of our ships limped back to London, damaged though they were, with crews shaken as badly as if they’d endured a month-long battle. “Shell shocked” is the term the Army is using now to describe the boys returning from the trenches in Alsace and Sebastopol. The doctors used other words to describe what happened to me, mostly Greek, or derived from the Greek. The scientific sound of them has provided more comfort and speeded my recovery more effectively than anything else the doctors prescribed.
On the day, the Chelston made port, and the expedition officially ended, Miss Hayes stopped by the sickbay to inform me that the
surviving cultists were going to be set free. “Such are the professor’s wishes,” she noted with a shrug, then offered me a few words of advice on dealing with her fellow pressmen, who would be swarming over the story like, she said, “rats on a carcass.” It was inevitable that the time she’d spent with the notoriously press-hating professor would sour her opinion of her fellows. Or perhaps she had witnessed this empty frenzy play out enough times with her own aether-warped eyes to recognize the game for what it is.
True to Miss Hayes’s prediction, it was impossible to avoid reading about the professor in the expedition’s aftermath. Claims of fraud, both intellectual and criminal, filled the papers day after day. The learned societies whose funds he had accepted declared that the entire misadventure was nothing short of a swindle, that he and Baglioni had staged the Atlantis debate to gain money and resources for a scientifically worthless monster hunt. The lack of hard evidence of the thing we dredged up and the confused accounts of the expedition’s final day fed the fires of controversy, though they eventually died down, smothered, some say, by the government. Those looking for a reason to explain such an intervention, or for the support the Crown provided the expedition in the first place, might mark the notable decrease in the crimes attributed to the doomsayers in the months after our return.
Though I never again spoke with the professor, I did receive a communication from him toward the end of my convalescence, just before I shipped out again. My name was on the envelope, but in a different hand from the note inside. It was most likely that of Miss Hayes, who had been tasked with delivering the heavy package and this letter:
Sir—
I am told by my associate, the bearer of this message, that I have you to thank for saving the logs and charts that the unconscionable cur Marsh attempted to take with him when he rid the world of his own pernicious presence. For that, I offer thanks, though I must also point out that you would have done a greater service to me and to the world if you had let him destroy his book of credulous gibberish instead of the few papers of mine to which he clung to obstinately as he went over the rail. Since Miss Hayes has also reminded me that you and I crossed paths aboard the ship, in an incident that I vaguely recall involved you taking a blow to stop me from treading upon a publication that is hardly worth even that low treatment, I cannot express surprise at your lack of discernment. Still, I recall you claiming an interest in knowledge, so by way of providing you with something more substantial with which to better yourself, I offer the enclosed. They are flawed, every last one of them, but they demonstrate thought. I hope it proves contagious and that by taking in what knowledge these volumes contain you will become a carrier. If ignorance and superstition can propagate in this fashion, so, too, can truth and reason.
—Charles Augustus Thaxton
As for the gift itself, it comprised well-read, dog-eared copies of The Origin of the Species, Hooke’s Micrographia, Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis` Principia Mathematica, Babbage’s Triumph of the Thinking Machine, and a dozen more. Many have notes in the margins, in Thaxton’s precise script, and a few have whole sections or entire chapters crossed out, with the word rubbish written across the pages. I value these books beyond measure.
Despite the challenges of keeping them safe from the grime and damp, I’ve carried one of the volumes with me each time I return to my home on the deep, on every ship I’ve manned since the Chelston. Some of my mates consider me a jinx because I served on the Thaxton Expedition—a venture as infamous as Scott’s disastrous trek to the Antarctic—and they view the books as nothing less than tokens of ill luck. I’ve been told that rousing the thing, whatever it was, finally jolted the world into the war that now engulfs it from pole to frozen pole.
I see it differently. I have a mission, the one with which the professor charged me in that final letter. I am an agent of truth, a carrier of knowledge. Like the cultists he let scatter back to their warrens to describe the rough treatment of their would-be god at the hands of one lone scientist, I spread the message: reason will triumph.
On most nights, when we are gliding across the great shroud of the sea, my shipmates and me, I speak to them of the products of science that keep us safe from Russian submersibles and French airships. The echo-mapping system now outfitted throughout our navy would seem familiar to anyone who had seen the equipment aboard the Chelston, and the remarkable new alloy that has found such sudden and widespread use among the shipbuilders of Great Britain is particularly well suited for armoring hulls. But there are times when I am reminded that the enemies’ weapons, too, are the product of science, and in those awful moments my mind conjures up an image of that thing beneath the Atlantic, and its vast demesne, built upon the bones and works of innumerable dead priests and warriors—and scholars, too. On those nights, I clutch the books the professor gave me a little more tightly and silently hope that they are, as he claimed, shields against chaos, and not charts setting our course toward that unspeakable kingdom of ruin.
SEASCAPE
Jack Ketchum
He rose slowly to a dim pale wavering light, crawling up through dense viscous fluid into full brightness and then finally clarity. He saw where he’d been swimming to and gasped and screamed.
* * *
“I’m going with you,” she said.
He smiled and put down his crossword puzzle on the comforter beside him on the bed.
Outside the open window, he could hear the sea, breakers against the jetty buffeted by winter winds.
“I don’t think so. What’s a five-letter word for mooed? Moo as in cow. Beginning with an ‘L’ I think.”
She was polishing the bedside table, rubbing in lemon oil. Giving it a drink was how she put it. “Lowed. And who says I’m giving you a choice, Ben.” She glanced at him and nodded. “Write it in,” she said.
* * *
Charlie Harmon had just passed by with a linen cart when he heard the scream devolve into a long low moan streaming out from 314, and he moved past the uniformed cop peering in through the doorway, brushed his shoulder as he passed so that the cop seemed to glare at him a moment, and it was only once he’d reached the old man’s bed that Charlie realized the cop was only startled—and maybe even a little scared.
The nurse was Denise. One of the good ones. Denise had brains and dedication, and her voice had the ability to soothe without false cheer. She was using it on him now as she lifted his head gently off the pillow, firmed it under him, set him back down again, and then reached for a tissue on the bedstand and dabbed his eyes. You just take it easy now you been through an a lot Mr. Sebald, you just rest up and you’re gonna be fine, doctor’ll be in here soon, and I’ll be right back, I’m just going to get you a little chipped ice for your throat okay? And you need anything else either, Charles here or I’ll come runnin’ won’t we Charles.
Outside in the hall again. He walked with her to the nurses’ station and the ice machine, and she sighed and shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I just don’t understand.”
“What’s with the cop?” Charlie said.
The ice tumbled down into the plastic cup.
“Suicide watch,” she said.
* * *
There was never a time in memory when Ben hadn’t loved the sea. Summers when he and his older brother John were growing up his family had rented a small wind-battered bungalow in Asbury Park, New Jersey—long before the town’s slide into decay—the same place five years running. The house lay directly on the beach. The porch was always dusted and sometimes halfway-buried with sand. A boy could roll out of bed and grab a glass of orange juice and a piece of buttered toast, and five minutes later be scouting the hard wet tideline for horseshoe crabs and jellyfish marooned along the shore.
At high tide, he bodysurfed the whitecaps tumbling to the beach.
He took part-time jobs summers during his college years at a lumberyard in Cape Cod, and a greasy-spoon diner in Falmouth, just to be near the sea and t
he kind of life the sea afforded—so long as you didn’t have to buck it for a living. A life of flesh and youth. Of tan-lines and dried white jagged salt lines against the skin, skin that glowed at night in driftwood firelight, that flaked and peeled and just below which lay a smooth new layer, fresh pink and incorruptible. He met his future wife Ruth—just twenty years old then—over lobster and corn on the cob at a clambake on the beach one night a few miles north of Portland, Maine
They slept together in the gentle susurration of that same beach the following night and with no one else ever again.
When his brother John died, he and Ruth had been living in New York City for almost thirty years. But the sea had never lost its lure for John either. Quite the contrary. He’d bought a small cape codder and set up practice directly after medical school in what was then the sleepy little town of Cape May, New Jersey long before the tourists discovered its turn-of-the-century charm—a house down by the Point where his only neighbor was a nun’s retreat, St. Mary’s by the Sea. When his heart failed him lunchtime one hot late-August afternoon walking out of the air-conditioned Ugly Mug into the sticky thick humidity along the sidewalk, he had just turned sixty. He had never married. He left the house to Ben and Ruth.
They’d been happy in New York, but there was nothing particularly keeping them there. Ruth had retired from the bank two years before, and Ben’s illustration work came and went by mail. They had no children and two tabby cats, George and Gracie, who were only too happy to be packed up and moved to someplace where birds large and small swooped by all day long, or pecked around for bugs along the porch, where bees and dragonflies zoomed and darted into view, and moths fluttered nightly at the windowpanes.
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans) Page 49