Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  My father must have done something to the auto-steer, I thought. But even if he had, I couldn’t understand from where the Dark Echo was deriving this propulsion. She weighed seventy tons. What freak force under the covering of the fog could be urging her on at such a rate? I needed to gather my thoughts. Nothing in my recent maritime schooling had prepared me for something so odd as this. The auto-steer had suffered a malfunction. That was clear. It might or might not be repairable, but for now there was no option. I had to switch it off. I had to take the wheel. I had to turn us swiftly about and raise sail and sit out the fog and, if necessary, the night. The North Atlantic was a very large expanse of ocean. We had plentiful supplies of food and water aboard. But we could not afford to lose our momentum. We had to keep going. It was what vessels under sail were obliged to do. If you failed to do that you became not just becalmed but helpless and you risked disaster and tragedy.

  I realised then how hungry I was. I had not eaten anything substantial for well over twenty-four hours. Where was my father? What was he doing? I felt as though I faced this sinister crisis entirely alone. I was hungry and thirsty, too. And I was close to clueless about what was going on with the boat, still slipping urgently through the fogbound sea in the wrong direction under my feet. With a loud curse, I locked the wheel. I had to eat. I had to rouse my father. I would wrestle with the boat’s steering but could not do it without sustenance. He could make me a mug of soup. It was the very least he could do.

  There were voices coming from his cabin. I knew he was the only person in there. But he was reading and reciting stuff and doing it in character. I stood outside his door and listened. There were snatches of Imagist and Vorticist poetry. There was some Wyndham Lewis and fragments of T.S. Eliot and what I thought I recognised as E.E. Cummings and part of a story by Ford Madox Ford. It was all of a piece, really, all from the same decade and most of it having originated among the expatriates in Paris. He began to recite that line from the Hemingway short story, the one that begins: In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.

  I knew it as the first line of the story ‘In Another Country’. It was familiar to me as the first line of what my father had often said he thought was the most beautiful paragraph of prose fiction written in English in the twentieth century. And I wouldn’t have argued with him. It was vivid and it had this melancholy cadence and it really was very beautiful. But he was reciting it over and over, behind his cabin door, like a mantra. And like a mantra, with repetition the words seemed to lose their sense of meaning altogether and become an abstract, inconsequential jumble of sounds.

  In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.

  And behind his door he laughed and the laugh was sardonic, almost a chuckle. And it was delivered in a high, viperish register that did not sound at all like the rumble of my father’s familiar laughter. And I thought that perhaps Harry Spalding was behind the door, sharing his desk and a joke with my dad, perusing the contents of my father’s gun cabinet with judicious expertise and the hole still jagged and dripping in his head from his self-murder.

  I almost slapped myself, then. It seemed as if my father was losing his mind. If I followed, then both of us were lost. I was very afraid, listening to what I was hearing from behind that door, the snatches of nonsense, the weird logic of its period somehow dictating it was not, any of it, entirely random. In his mind, he was in the 1920s. He was in the decade of Lindbergh and Dempsey and Carpentier and Bricktop and Al Capone.

  And Harry Spalding, of course. Who Suzanne had insisted was the Devil himself.

  If I succumbed to panic now, then I would not be able to save my father. Both of us would be lost. Under me, I thought I could feel the boat gathering speed and impetus. I stole away from the cabin door towards the galley. I would have to get my own food. I had to eat or I felt I would faint. Though now, of course, I found my appetite was entirely gone.

  ‘Martin?’

  I did not reply.

  ‘Martin? Why don’t you join our little salon? We’re devoting ourselves to a cultural evening.’ More laughter, this time muffled, as though the mirth were contained by a stifling hand. ‘It’s all very intimate and not at all formal. You’re more than welcome.’

  Was this how people sounded when they went mad? Was I sharing this wilful, disobedient boat in the middle of an ocean with a madman? When I got to the galley I realised I was sobbing. Tears dripped from my face on to surfaces still with the showroom sheen of newness on them. We had been at sea less than a week and were victims of catastrophe. The situation was hopeless. It was hopeless. But it was not terror that made me weep, and it was not self-pity either. It was grief for my father, believing him lost.

  I ate a bowl of chicken and lentil broth in the fog at the wheel with a chunk of defrosted bread. And I drank with my meal a large measure of rum. I had brought the rum aboard myself as a sort of ironic joke, played against the traditions of the sea. But I badly needed a drink and it was warm in my belly and a comfort as the Dark Echo continued with smooth relentlessness through the water on its rogue course. The booze emboldened me, I think. I realised that I would have to confront my father. There were guns in his cabin. In his present, irrational mood, he was a danger to himself and a liability to both of us. Maybe I would be obliged to restrain him. Perhaps I would have to do that and then dump the various weapons over the side. But I could not just ignore what was going on. It was a reversal of our normal roles, but I had a duty of care to my dad. And there was an urgent practical imperative. If I could shake him out of the delusional fugue he was in, he could help me with the boat. His seamanship was more than the equal of mine. Maybe he had tampered with the auto-steer and maybe he had not. Whatever, the graveness of the situation and the rum told me that I had no choice but to confront him.

  I knocked.

  ‘Enter.’

  His cabin looked normal. There was no harsh smell of tobacco and the lamps lit the space with unambiguous clarity. I stole a glance at the guns in their cabinet. But there was no belligerence about them now. They looked like the lethal tools they undoubtedly were. But there was a neutrality about them that had been troublingly absent earlier. My father looked groomed, composed. He must have eaten, too, I thought. Certainly he had discovered the presence of mind from somewhere to shower and shave. Under us, I could feel the Dark Echo smooth on its mutinous path. If anything, the vessel was getting faster in the fog. It was inexplicable.

  ‘We’re on a homeward heading, Dad.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why?

  ‘You’re a good sailor, Martin. I’ve watched you. You’re punctilious and possess no shortage of endurance.’ He smiled, but it was a flawed, conflicted smile. ‘I’ve been delighted with you. I’ve been proud of you, truth be told. But I’m no part of what the Dark Echo is doing, in answer to your unasked question. She’s doing what she’s doing. It’s no doing of mine.’

  I dumped myself in the chair at his desk in front of him.

  ‘All our communications systems are out. Cellular, satellite phone, wireless. We don’t have sonar and email is so sporadic it’s virtually useless. The engine is completely dead. The binnacle compass is the only instrument still working consistently. That, and the emergency beacon, which no one can see anyway in the fog. We know which direction we’re going in, but we can’t pinpoint our own position. Even if we could, we can’t get on to the emergency frequencies to put out a Mayday call. We’re on our own.’

  ‘Do you think this fog is some sort of experimental thing we’ve blundered into?’

  He smiled. ‘Are you asking me if it has a military application? I don’t think so, Martin. And neither do you. It’s a long time since the character who conjured this fog had anything to do with the military.’ He reached for the framed picture of the boat, the one he had seen originally as a child. He held it between his hands. ‘I remember very vividly the time I first saw this photograph. The volume containing it la
y open on the page. It lay in a pool of sunlight on the bedside locker at which I would sit to do my homework. My mother swore she hadn’t put it there. We did not run in those days to domestic staff, Martin. And I did not take it from the shelf and put it there myself. Was it destiny, do you think? Or was it some omnipotent design, dictating my ambitions, shaping the fabric of my dreams.’

  He put the picture back down. He lifted his hands to his face and rubbed at his eyes with his fingers. ‘It gets hard, after the age of forty or so.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘You lose the resilience. You lose the dynamism. There are all sorts of ways of continuing the illusion of youth. But that’s what it becomes, son. It becomes an illusion. And it turns itself, regardless of your will, into a memory. You become tired. And fatigue makes a man vulnerable.’

  I didn’t much care about what he was saying, to be honest. I was just relieved that he was sounding like my father again. It was that happy mixture of portentousness and self-pity and good sense I fondly recognised as him. But we had still the problem to confront of our ungovernable boat. I’d have called her delinquent, but she was ninety years old. There were forces aboard her, I felt, far more profound and troubling than delinquency. She felt possessed.

  It was then that I noticed the mirror. The small brass-bound mirror in which I had caught Spalding’s reflection on my first terrible visit to the boat was back were I had seen it then. It had been mounted in its original place on my father’s cabin wall.

  ‘I need you on the deck, now, Dad. We’ve got to try to turn her about. We have to assert control over her. Either you’re the master of this vessel or you’re not. I believe you are.’

  ‘So I am, by God,’ he said. He thumped the table. His jaw jutted. He held my eyes steadily. He sounded as though he meant it. Had I succeeded in rekindling the pride that remained in him? It was his cherished dream, after all, that had descended into this waking nightmare. Perhaps he had remembered Monsignor Delaunay’s blessing. Whatever, with what seemed like fresh hope and newly summoned defiance, we went above.

  The fog had thickened. And it seemed the Dark Echo had gathered speed. I wrestled with the wheel, but she kept heading back to the same slyly insistent course. We raised our sails to try to put about by harnessing the wind. It was what you did aboard a sailing boat. But there was no wind to harness. The sails sagged in the windless mist like shrouds. We dropped a dragging anchor, just in an attempt to slow her down, to arrest the impetus of the vessel. The anchor chain merely strained and groaned against the capstan as her speed through the still water further increased.

  ‘It’s as though we’re only provoking her,’ I said.

  ‘It’s him we’re provoking,’ my father said. He was standing beside the deck compass. ‘If we continue on this heading, in four or five days we shall reach the Irish coastline. There we will founder. Unless we can stop her, on her present course, she will either run aground or break up on the rocks off the coast of County Clare.’

  I could see the boat in my mind, dashed to pieces in the boiling surf under the great, indifferent ramparts of the Cliffs of Moher. Was that to be our fate?

  We stood there beside one another on the deck, mist prickling our skin, salt in our lungs, all silence except for the water trailing the stern of the seventy tons of wood and metal aboard which we were now no more than hostages. Or prisoners. Despite my father’s cryptic mention of Spalding, I did not feel that his ghost shared our voyage. I felt rather that my father and myself were the only people left in the world. And the sense of isolation and our helplessness in it was terrible.

  ‘I’m going below, Martin. I can do nothing here.’

  ‘You can do nothing there.’

  ‘I can get drunk,’ my father said.

  I did not answer him.

  ‘I’m going below.’

  I went below myself. I turned on the computer, but my email would neither send nor receive. So I started to write – which had become almost a compulsion with me – and, I thought, might provide more comfort for the moment than the bottle in which my father would be seeking his consolation.

  I began writing this account on the evening of the day all those months ago at Bullen and Clore that my father bought the boat. I have kept at it faithfully over the days and weeks and months since then. I brought it aboard the Dark Echo on a disc. And I transferred the file to my little white laptop. Writing it, as the account grew, I’d often wondered what it was for. It seemed part diary, part chronicle and part confession. Reading it back, sometimes the tone of it seemed to me a bit pompous or hysterical. Its singular virtue was truth. Every word of what I’d written – and now continued to write – was a true account of what had taken place. And now I did at last know what its function was to be, always assuming that little bit of luck or providence required. I was not confident about this part. Luck seemed an element in desperately short supply aboard the Dark Echo.

  I was interrupted by a roar from my father’s cabin. It could have been a cry equally of pain or triumph. But whatever it was, it was inspired, I was sure, by more than just whatever it was he was choosing to drink. I got up from my chair, walked towards the stern and knocked loudly on his door.

  ‘Come in, Martin.’

  There was a sea chest sitting at the centre of his desk. It was old and iron-bound and water-stained. And my father was breathless from the exertion of putting it there. I looked around the cabin. He had removed a wall panel from about waist height on the starboard side. I could make out the struts and rivets strengthening the bulkhead in the shadowy gloom of the gap.

  ‘I heard a rattling,’ he said. ‘I decided to investigate. This must have belonged to Harry Spalding.’

  Or the Waltrow brothers, I thought. I swallowed. Or Gubby Tench. But it couldn’t have belonged to any of them, could it? The man who called himself Jack Peitersen would surely have found it during the refit. And that had been only the boat’s most recent overhaul. Surely this box could not have lain there undiscovered for eighty years? My father clearly thought it had. Just as he thought he had heard it rattling in its snug cavity, with the boat on a straight course over water as smooth as glass.

  ‘There’s a toolbox in the sail store, Martin.’

  I nodded. I knew there was.

  ‘Go and fetch a crowbar or a jemmy.’ The padlock on the trunk was made of brass. It had tarnished, of course. But it had not corroded. I went and got the jemmy and came back and forced the lock. I lifted the lid of the trunk. It opened on a foul stench of marine decay. This long-dead odour could not have accrued over a matter of weeks. It was years, decades, since the interior of the trunk had been exposed to light and air.

  I had to stand away to let the stink dissipate for fear that I might gag and vomit. The smell was nauseatingly strong. When it had weakened a little, diluted to pervade the cabin, I took a step forward again and looked into the trunk. It contained a badly tarnished rectangular wooden case. There had been padding put around the case and it had rotted to a putrid black paste. That was the source of the awful smell.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s an old-fashioned sewing machine,’ I said. I had seen them in antique shops, even in the houses of people who liked their homes stuffed with chintz and curios.

  But I was mistaken. When I lifted the heavy box free of the trunk and set it down on my father’s desk and took off the lid, it was not a sewing machine at all. It was a record player. It was one of those primitive machines that plays recordings cut into wax cylinders. And there were three such cylinders in the box with the machine, carefully laid into a velvet bed grooved to house them. I realised that the cylinders were also to blame in part for the foul smell rising to pervade my father’s cabin. The wax had corrupted somehow and had a clinging, fetid reek.

  ‘Put one on,’ my father said. ‘Let’s hear what we have, Martin.’ His voice sounded sane and calm. He was quite serious. He had stumbled upon a mystery. And now he wanted to explore it.

  �
�They won’t play,’ I said. ‘The wax has become unstable, you can smell it decomposing. What do you think that vile stink is?’

  ‘Put one on.’

  ‘The machine will have long seized up, Dad. You can’t possibly expect it to play.’

  ‘Then I’ll put one on myself,’ he said. He shouldered me out of the way. His hand hovered over the cylinders and he selected one. The lights in the cabin flickered, then, dimming. I looked up at one of the portholes. The fog was bruise-coloured. You could not tell if it was night or day. He put the recording in its cradle at the top of the machine and dropped the needle and began to turn the handle. I knew what would happen, before the handle turned, when he dropped the needle on to the wax. It slotted down as smoothly as if the machine had been routinely cleaned and lubricated only yesterday.

  The static of eighty years ago filled the cabin. And then the voice came, keen and high and cruel. ‘Magnus, old sport. Wanted to welcome you aboard. And your son, of course. Wanted to welcome Martin, too. Hope you’re both having a fine old time.’ There was laughter, then. And it was sardonic down the decades, reaching us. The hair on the back of my neck prickled at the sound of it. It was a sound neither sane, nor human.