by Andre Norton
Griff inspected his equipment with the care of a veteran diver who knew only too well that a single slip or rash lack of examination might mean his life. The depth gauge was his special protection now. If the blue hole before him was too deep, he would have warning and be able to drop his weight belt and pull out in time. But, even as one part of his mind thought that, he was looking about for a piece of coral of the right size to add to the weight about his middle. Holmes had followed carrying an underwater lamp, and Commander Murray dropped from his shoulder a coil of lifeline.
Griff slipped his feet into his flippers, made them fast. He shrugged into the tank straps, felt the weight of that precious supply of air settle into place like a knapsack, wriggling muscles until he was sure of the right balance. He wouldn't try a straight dive here; instead, he used the lifeline to lower himself slowly into the water. The surface, warmed by the sun, was at blood temperature, but as the water closed over his head there came a chill.
He made the descent, using the line as a check. Someone with a good sense of timing was lowering the lamp at a speed almost equal to his own. And, as the murk around him deepened, he flashed it on. Fish swam here, came to gather in the beam, goggling in stupid bewilderment.
Another object came dangling down, and Griff identified a light fish spear. He used it to fend away from the broken surface of the wall, keeping a watch for a crevice or hole from which the flat, evil head of a moray might project.
Down, down—now he was in a twilight, which might have been more disturbing had he not had that experience of diving after nightfall. The ray of the lamp gave him an excellent picture of his surroundings, and it might keep at a distance the larger creatures of the deep.
A sea urchin clung to a ledge, its poisonous spines thrown into high relief by the light. Anemones, crabs, other life flowed, swam, crawled about him as he kicked his way down. Time ceased to have meaning as it always did under water. He would have said that he had been a half hour in the leisurely descent, when his water-protected watch registered only minutes.
Then he saw what he was searching for, what the hunch had told him did exist. But as he clung to the line, drifting, he swallowed, and a prickling chill, which was not born of the water, ran along his spine. Opposite him was a black hole, a hole into which the full light of the lamp beamed to show no inner wall. If this wasn't the entrance of the sea passage, it was more than just a cave.
Now he must enter that hole, swing along into the dark unknown, where he could be trapped, where a lifeline fouled about a rock, as his father's fouled in the sea, would not help him. But this was what he had come to find—and inwardly Griff knew that there was no returning.
He fastened the spear in his belt loop. Then he gave the agreed signal on the line. Unhooking the lamp from its cord, he flipped his way into the hole.
Ragged rock, sea things— He flinched from stinging coral, trying to watch for any unpleasant surprises, animal or vegetable, which might lurk there. The passage sloped downward, to Griff another proof that this was what he sought—it must drop to below coast level. He kept his attention to what lay ahead, tried not to remember that he was making his way down an enclosed vein in the rock. Now and again he gave a tug to the line. It was free, untrapped by the rocks.
Just as it was difficult to judge time under water, so did distance cease to register properly. Perspective under the surface was warped, and Griff could have been inches from what he saw ahead—or feet. But the steady, unfailing beam of the light showed him what obstructions to avoid. It was a journey that could not have been made in darkness—too many projections, and once a turn, which he negotiated with care.
Then, all at once, the walls of the tunnel fell away, and Griff swam out into open space. The sea? But it couldn't be! Beyond the path of the lamp was darkness. He flapped up until his head broke surface. Where in the world was this?
Treading water, he pulled up the lamp and swept it around. He was in a vast pool, and to the left were rocks with their tops above water. Griff made for these and clung there, one arm across a slimy surface in support. The lamp displayed a ledge a little above, and he pulled himself up on that.
Gingerly he pushed up his mask. There was air—but it bore an odd and disagreeable musky taint. The walls were glistening with weed to a point well above his head—they must be covered at high tide. He turned the light out over the surface. It centered on a rock some distance away.
"Helloooo—"
Griff started, almost lost his grip on the slippery ledge and went back into the water. That hail, distorted by the echoes that magnified and dehumanized it, was the last thing he had expected. Bracing himself against the wall, having taken the precaution of snapping down his mask again against an involuntary descent into the flood, he got to his feet and flashed the ray of the lamp in a slow crawl along the opposite wall of the cavern.
Then the light picked up and held a waving arm, found the head and shoulders of a weird, masked monster, who apparently could not move but lay on water-washed rocks.
Griff went into the water and swam, the light beam before him pinpointing that figure. Then he fetched up against the tiny rock island, and a hand closed with convulsive tightness about the wrist he lifted for a hold.
"Snap off that light!" Griff knew his father's voice, hoarse, low, and hurried, as if they were in some danger that could be drawn by that core of hard yellow radiance.
Griff pulled up on the islet and levered up his mask. They were crowded together in the dark, and he heard the click of metal against metal as his air tank struck against some part of Dr. Gunston's equipment. His father was breathing heavily, as if half-winded from some exertion.
"How did you get in?" The question came with queer pauses between words. "It's waiting out there in the other cave. If it hadn't had that poor devil to amuse it, I wouldn't have escaped—"
Griff felt a shudder pass through the body so close to his. He drew a deep breath of the tainted air. His father didn't sound hysterical, but there was an odd note in his voice.
"I took a chance on one of the inland pools. Just followed a hunch—"
"The wells!" Dr. Gunston was honestly surprised. "A back door. Then there is another way out of here! We don't have to pass it—"
"Pass what, sir?"
"The monster—the thing, whatever it is, that's laired up in the outer sea cave here. I was swept in by a wave. It was—busy—" his father's voice again slid up scale a tone or two—"with the Navy diver when I caught it in my lamp. Then the light drew it. I dived, dropped the lamp to the bottom to interest it, and came up in here. The Lord only knows where 'here' is! But there's no going back with that thing doing sentry—"
"A dupee—?" Griff used the only term he knew for the dead monster of the beach.
"I didn't get a good look at it. But it's something which has no right to be alive in this day and age! One of Le Marr's voodoo nightmares!"
"We can make it back to the pool," Griff said confidently. "The passage is fairly easy."
But to his surprise his father did not agree at once. There was a lengthy pause, and then Dr. Gunston spoke.
"I've a game leg—gave it a scrape on something when I dived to get away from the thing's rush."
Whether it was wise or not, Griff used the lamp, training the lowest wattage beam on his father. Across his thigh was a line of red dots, and about them the flesh was already puffing into ugly swelling. Griff could guess the agony of pain that must be knotting muscle and flesh. And that must be seen to at once! It could be the mark of any kind of wound from a coral scrape to breaks left by the poisonous spines of some fish.
"We'll get out!" From somewhere he found that confidence—making his voice sound firm even in his own unbelieving ears.
A length of the snapped life cord was still at his father's belt. With that linking them together, he should be able to win back up the vent to the well and safety. At least that was their only chance now.
; VI
TOO LITTLE, MUCH TOO LATE
years afterwards nightmare memories of that journey back up to the inland pool awoke Griff bathed in a cold sweat. Dr. Gunston, with iron endurance, had held on to consciousness. But for much of the trip back Griff was supporting a limp body. He dropped his own weighted belt, the spear, every bit of extra equipment he dared abandon.
A coral graze on his shoulder set blood to staining the water and brought a dryness to his mouth. What if that summoned the mysterious nightmare from which his father had fled—or any of the other carnivora that might lurk in the circle of day beyond the lamp? He could only force himself to swim at that steady pace which would mean their eventual salvation.
The tunnel walls opened out—he was in the well. And someone above had sense enough to rig a ladder over the lip of the rim. He clung with one hand to the rungs, supporting Dr. Gunston's weight with an arm that felt as it it were being pulled from its socket. A splash of water in his face—then the weight was gone. Hands, locked in his armpits, pulled him up. But it wasn't until he lay on a blanket on the sand, his face free from the mask, tank and flippers stripped from him, that Griff realized he had made it.
He sat up. "Dad?"
A Seabee grinned at him. "They're carting him down to the base—where Doc can get to work on him. He's got a bad leg—"
Griff pulled himself up. He knew just how bad that leg could be! And there was Hughes and Casey. If his father's story were true, any seaside diver might be in trouble. He had to get moving. But he was plowing heavy-footed through the sand as if weights were on each foot. A hand slipped under his arm.
"Go small, mon—" The soft slur of island speech brought his head up.
"Le Marr!"
There was something reassuring about the voodoo man. Griff had a queer feeling that alone of those around him now Le Marr could believe in that weird world beneath them, take at face value his father's report of the menace that had killed the Navy diver.
"Debble thing—" It was as if Le Marr read his mind. "Mon go in debble thing's house-hole—come out. You have the gris-gris in here." His long ivory finger tapped Griff lightly on the breast.
"There is something in there?"
Le Marr nodded, his face serious. "Debble thing."
"Has it been there long?"
The other answered in the negative. "Come lately. Sign—bad sign—"
They had crossed the sandy desert and were following a line of tracks back to the base.
"What kind of sign?"
Le Marr did not answer that. Instead he spoke over his shoulder to the Seabees trailing them with Griff's diving apparatus.
"Tell mons that dive—debble thing down there—"
"Sure, pop." The cheerful American voice rang loudly over the softer speech of San Isadore. "The commander's already passed the word to stop."
The glare of the sun and his own fatigue blurred his surroundings for Griff. He had a vague idea that he had been half-carried over the last section into the base, and only when pain pricked his upper arm did he come around. He was lying on an examination table while a medical corpsman cleaned and treated the coral graze.
"—you'll fly him out then?" Murray's deep voice came from the hall.
"It's a matter of time, Commander. Yes, I'd say his only chance was the mainland. Hooker can take a stretcher in the cabin, and I'll make the trip with him. Frankly—I've never seen anything like it. Some kind of poison and a very virulent one. It's amazing he's lasted this long. We've got to learn what it is before we have another case on our hands."
"All right. I'll alert Hooker. You want to leave at once?"
"As soon as it is humanly possible."
Who were they going to fly out? As the corpsman walked to the supply cupboard, Griff sat up.
"Hey, fella—"
The man turned, but Griff was already on his way to the door. He reached that vantage point just in time to see a stretcher being borne past. And his father's face, flushed and swollen, puffed eyes half-open but unseeing, his father's voice muttering in a thick, senseless whisper flashed before him. The corpsman had caught up with Griff and could not be shaken off when the younger Gunston tried to follow the stretcher down the corridor.
"Take it easy, kid. Doc's flying your old man up to the States—they'll be able to fix him up. We aren't equipped to handle it here. They'll have him under treatment in three—four hours. Lieutenant Hooker's a hot pilot and knows how to get speed out of that bus of his-"
So Griff had to watch the seaplane off, blinking as it disappeared into the bright blue of the afternoon sky. Hughes reached the landing stage just as the plane lifted.
"How is it with the chief?" Beneath his tan, his face was greenish white and drawn. There was a moment of silence, and it was Griff who replied, steadily enough:
"He got some scratches—"
"Poisoned?" Hughes demanded sharply, almost as if Griff had been responsible.
"Something new—at least Doc can't diagnose it," Murray cut in. "That's why he's flying him north. He needs an expert opinion."
"Something new," Hughes repeated savagely. "Yes— we're up against something new all right, Commander. Your man is gone, you know—"
Breck Murray's mouth set grimly. "So we pieced out from some things Dr. Gunston said. What did he tell you?" He rounded on Griff. "Or what did you see down there?"
Griff described the underground cave but added that all he knew about the menace that guarded the sea entrance was what his father had told him—that some unknown sea dweller had killed the Navy diver and that Dr. Gunston had only escaped from it by chance.
"And what did you see?" Murray swung now to Hughes.
"I got in far enough to spot the torch the chief dropped. Then it was caught up by something. I didn't get a good look at it—"
"Shark?" Murray hazarded.
Hughes replied to that with a firm negative. "I'd take my oath it's nothing we know. You heard of the thing that was found on the beach before your arrival?"
"Some garbled stuff about a sea serpent." Murray looked perplexed.
"Not a sea serpent in the snake sense," Hughes corrected. "But it was an aquatic mammal, large, unknown, and we are still trying to classify it—"
"Man-eater?"
"It was a flesh-eater, yes," Hughes admitted. "And it bears resemblance to the most recent reports of the so-called 'sea serpents' that have been sighted from ships."
"And now we've another of the things roosting down there in that cave!" the commander burst out. "It's liable to make things hot for any diver?"
"How can I tell what it will do?" Hughes shouted back. "We don't know anything about it. But it did get your diver this morning, and it attacked Dr. Gunston, I'd say you'd better get rid of it if you want to feel safe under water here. It may hunt only at night, keep under cover during the day. But we can't be sure of that—"
"What we need, skipper"—Casey, looking as tired and drawn as Hughes, had come up to join them—"is a bomb planted down there."
"Maybe you're right. Look over our stuff, Casey, and see what we have which will be a good answer to a sea serpent—" Murray rubbed his hand wearily across his sweating face.
Griff sat down in the half-finished mess hall. The food, which had just been placed before him, was good —it smelled like home. But, though he hadn't eaten since early that morning, he did not pick up his fork. There was something wrong. The same hunch that had led him to venture into the inland pool was working. He could agree that they had no way of enticing the mysterious monster out of its cave, nor could they be sure that it would come out. There were sea dwellers content enough to remain in self-chosen prisons from which they never emerged, allowing the water currents to supply them at random with food. Perhaps Casey's suggestion was the only possible answer, and he was a demolition expert, used to such tricks under water.
Only Griff could not rid himself of a feeling of foreboding, a feeling that was not born of the worry co
nnected with the plane beating its way north. They had had two radio reports in flight. Dr. Gunston was still holding his own, and as long as life remained they had hope.
"I will speak with the commander now—" The voice was soft over a core of iron. Griff glanced up to see Le Marr.
The islander was at ease, a man with a mission, and he manifestly was in no way influenced by Holmes's scowl and refusal.
"This is restricted territory. You'll be given an escort to the edge of the zone and then—you'll beat it!" But in spite of the authority of those words, there was uncertainty below them. Holmes had been briefed in the routine of his job, was zealous in its duties. But there were no regulations to cover the happenings of the past few hours. Nothing in security files taught a man to stand up to an unknown carnivore at the bottom of the sea, nor did it prepare one for tactfully handling a voodoo priest, the unofficial ruler of the island. Griff cut in.