Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  She began to hope again. It was only two hours, and they were both good swimmers. Hughie, she knew, could stay afloat four hours easily, and they would have been swimming this way—no, he couldn’t even see the masts at this distance, not down in the water. But for at least half the time he would have been able to see them, anyway each time he came to the top of a swell. It was still three hours and more till dark, and she’d get Bellew to hoist her to the top of the mainmast in a bosun’s chair. They’d get there in time. Then the breeze began to falter. It came on again for three or four minutes, dropped once more, and then died completely.

  They couldn’t run the engine. They’d already used up all the fuel. They lay helplessly in the trough and rolled.

  They launched the dinghy. Bellew wanted to go because he could row faster, but she insisted. She was two hundred yards away before she realized she didn’t have the faintest idea which direction she was going in. She came back and got a compass and set it between her feet, even though she knew it was hopeless looking for them in the dinghy. She was too low in the water to see anything or to be seen. She was far out from Orpheus when the sun went down and it began to grow dark. She stood up in the dinghy, calling his name until she could no longer see anything but the distant gleam of the masthead light Bellew had turned on. She rowed back and went aboard. She lay in the cabin in the darkness, trying not to think of what it must have been like to see the boat sailing away from him a thousand miles from land. Bellew came in and tried to speak to her. She didn’t even know what he said. He went away, into the forward cabin.

  About half an hour later she heard him run through the deckhouse on the way to the deck, shouting, “I heard something.” She ran up. The spreader lights were on, as well as the masthead light, but they were glowing only faintly, scarcely brighter than candles, because the batteries were discharged. She ran back into the deckhouse for a flashlight. She began throwing its beam out across the water. Then she heard the sound too, a faint whimpering, but it was coming from aboard rather than from the water. She threw the light forward.

  Hughie had come up the ladder and was lying at the foot of the mainmast, his arms locked around it, his face pressed against the wood. His shoulders shook, and he was still making that not quite human sound deep in his throat. She noticed, in that way you sometimes fix your attention on details in moments of overwhelming emotion, that there was a gaping and bluish cut, no longer bleeding, across the knuckles of his right hand. He was alone. Estelle hadn’t come back.

  “As weak as he was after six hours in the water,” she went on, “it took both of us to pry his arms loose from the mast. We half led and half carried him below and put him on his bunk. He opened his eyes; at first they were completely blank, and then he began to recognize us. He cringed back and jumped off the bunk and cowered back in a corner, screaming at us. He was almost incoherent, but we could understand bits of what he was saying. We’d tried to kill him. We’d gone off and left him deliberately. I was only pretending to be asleep and knew he’d gone into the water. And there was something about a shark, over and over.

  “In the end, Bellew had to hold him while I injected a sedative dose of morphine in his arm. He fought us, and when he felt the prick of the needle he screamed.

  “He never let either of us come near him again. He slept, if he ever slept at all, in the sail locker up forward, with the door barricaded inside. He looked rational, at least most of the time, but he was silent and withdrawn. He would never approach the rail without that look of horror on his face and a death grip on something solid, like a man with acrophobia frozen to a girder a thousand feet above the street. When we’d try to question him about Estelle, he’d go all to pieces and begin shouting again about a shark. I made Bellew stop asking him.

  It was three days before I got a more or less coherent story of what had happened.

  “They’d been attacked by a shark. He still had his mask on, and he swam down and hit it on the snout with his fist, trying to drive it away. That was the way he got that wound on his hand. It had avoided him because he was under the water, but had come up and gone for Estelle, who was threshing on the surface. It cut her in two. There was nothing he could do. He swam out of the bloody water and got away, but the sight of it was too much—that and the fear, and the belief we’d done it deliberately. He cracked up.”

  So Bellew was right, Ingram thought. He was on the point of asking if she believed the story herself, but realized the futility of it. If she did believe it, it was only because she refused to accept the truth. She, better than any of them, should know what Hughie was really running from, but if she had already made the choice and was determined to accept the blame, argument was useless, and there were more urgent things to think about at the moment. No doubt a psychiatrist could dig it out of her and force her to acknowledge it, but he wasn’t a psychiatrist, they were on a sinking boat in mid-ocean, and nine-tenths of his mind was occupied with the cold and relentless struggle to keep the thought of Rae from swamping it. And, in the end, perhaps the specific act for which she blamed herself wasn’t significant anyway. The guilt she accepted was the blanket indictment of having been the link at which the lengthening chain of Hughie-protection had finally snapped. She’d been minding the baby when it crawled into the goldfish pond and drowned.

  It was possible, of course, that Hughie did think—or had managed to convince himself—that they’d deliberately gone off and left the two of them to die. And naturally he might have an irrational fear of water, after having been in it for six hours in mid-ocean, part of the time in the dark and thinking of the bottom ten thousand feet below him. But neither of these was the horror he was trying to escape, the thing he saw when something was sinking in the water below him. That was Estelle. The only part of it that was difficult to understand was what sick compulsion had kept him there, looking down through the mask at her body falling into the depths after he had killed her.

  He’d seen the wound on Hughie’s hand. And it wasn’t an abrasion such as he’d have received from striking the sand-papery skin of a shark. It was a cut. It had been caused by human teeth, or the broken glass of a diving mask.

  So Estelle had panicked and tried to climb up on him to get out of the water, the way the drowning often did. He’d beaten her off with his fists and knocked her out. And the ironic part of it was that, for anybody willing to accept at least a portion of the blame, there’d still have been a way out. Subduing the panicky person who was threatening to drown both himself and his rescuer was an accepted part of lifesaving. Somebody else might have convinced himself he’d hit her only to try to save her, so he could turn her on her back and tow her, and then she’d slipped away from him and drowned before he could get her back to the surface. But not Hughie, who couldn’t accept any of the penalty for anything. He’d had to invent his nonexistent shark, which even he couldn’t believe. But he had to believe it, and go on believing it, or face an unpleasant fact for the first time in his life. And, for a beginner, he’d been handed a rough one to face.

  She must have still had the camera slung around her neck. Those 35 mm. jobs were heavy for their size, and with none of the built-in buoyancy from a standard underwater housing it must have been just enough to tip the scales beyond that state of near equilibrium of a woman’s body in salt water—any woman except the very thin and muscular and heavy-boned—and keep her falling straight below him after she was unconscious. Even then, the rate of descent was probably very slow, at least until she was down to where the pressure began collapsing her chest cavity. And Hughie had watched her.

  No, he thought then, not necessarily. Maybe he’d only imagined watching her; maybe it had already begun in his mind. At any rate, there was the horror, and there was the beginning of that awareness of depth, or of height, upon which he was impaled—seeing the body of this friend, this woman who’d been so good to him and whom he’d killed in panic to save his own life, slide into the ever-deepening abyss below him, still clearly visible
at fifty feet, a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, and after she had dwindled and disappeared entirely he could go on imagining it—a thousand feet, five thousand, ten thousand, and still falling.

  Jesus, he thought, I’m glad I’m carrying it around looking for a place to set it down.

  He was aware then that Orpheus’s motion was changing. The groundswell was becoming confused as it encountered the mounting seas built up in the squall. He glanced out toward the dark turbulence of the sky in the northeast and the advancing wall of rain that was probably less than two miles away.

  “Maybe you’d better call Bellew,” he said.

  13

  Without any remembrance at all of how she’d got there she was standing on the companion ladder, looking out into blazing sunlight and the encircling blue of the sea. Ten feet in front of her the golden impervious head was poised above the binnacle, and she could hear herself shrieking through the clatter of the engine.

  “Go back! For the love of God, go back before something awful happens! Don’t make it happen, don’t make it, please don’t make it!” Her voice skidded up over the rim into hysteria and incoherence.

  There was no reply. He glanced at her briefly and then back at the compass with something of the studied avoidance of a diner looking the other way after a waiter has dropped a tray of food, as though he was as disappointed in this uncouth screeching as he had been in her selfishness. Then, with no clear idea how she’d got there either, she was back in the forward cabin, holding onto the upright pipe of the bunk frame with one hand while she ran the fingers of the other across the side of her face and upward into her hair. Something was quivering, either her face or the hand, but she wasn’t sure which, any more than she was sure whether she’d actually gone out there and screamed the warning at him or whether she’d just imagined it. No, she must have gone out, because the door was unlatched and open. She could hear it banging behind her as Saracen rolled.

  The shotgun still lay on the bunk where she’d dropped it, the three separate, improbable pieces suddenly united and frozen into this unmistakable shape of deadliness. She jerked her eyes away from it and looked at her watch, and then a second time in disbelief. It was 12:45 p. m. Time was hurtling past her, and she was beginning to lose whole intervals of it. They were already twenty miles from that sinking boat, and by sunset, when they’d be over fifty, she would have cracked completely. Her chin still quivering, she looked around the tiny compartment again, seeing for the twentieth time only the walls of the trap, this comer she’d been backed into and from which there was no escape except one. She’d tried everything else, and it was hopeless. He was impregnable, unreachable.

  Then, with the suddenness of a thrown switch, the wildness and despair were gone, and she was strangely calm. It was as if her mind had come into focus at last, with everything else dropping away until there remained only the two simple, elemental facts she’d been groping for all the time, the only two that mattered at all. John was going to die unless she saved him. And she had the means to do it.

  At first she thought the engine had stopped, it had grown so quiet. But when she listened, she could still hear it; it was just farther away, and there was a faint rushing or ringing sound inside her head, as if she had been taking quinine. It was like being enclosed in some huge bubble that protected her from all extraneous sound or thought or interference. It was cold inside the bubble, and there didn’t seem to be enough air, because her breathing was rapid and very shallow, but she was invulnerable to everything beyond. She went over and picked up the shotgun.

  And this was strange too, with some feeling that she’d done it before and knew exactly what she had to do. It was as if, while her conscious mind was recoiling from it in revulsion, some far level of the unconscious had already accepted the gun with complete fatalism and calmly planned its use. She had to learn how it worked. She pointed it away from her and tried to pull the triggers. Nothing happened. But she’d expected that. Guns had safety mechanisms of some kind so they couldn’t be fired accidentally. She began searching for the key to it, and found it immediately, since it was the only part of the weapon not already identified. It had to be this small oblong button just back of the lever that broke it open at the breech so you could put in the shells. She tried to push the button down, but nothing happened. Then it must slide. She pushed it forward, and it did, perhaps a quarter of an inch. She pulled the triggers and heard the clicks, one after the other, as hammers fell on the firing pins.

  The shells. Still inviolate within her bubble of cold and unswerving concentration, she went out into the after cabin and knelt before the drawer. There were two boxes of them. Both had been wrapped in plastic and then covered with two or three coats of varnish to protect them from the humidity of the tropics. She’d need a knife. She was making a note of this and reaching over the medicine kit for one of the boxes of shells, when she paused. It was only for a minor part of a second, a fleeting but inexplicable hiatus of movement that was noticeable at all only because ever since she’d accepted this thing and committed herself she’d been going forward with the inevitability of some machine running downhill on rails.

  Poised there on the dead center of this almost imperceptible hesitation, with the feeling that somebody was pounding on the wall of the bubble, trying to get in or to attract her attention, she looked down into the drawer, wondering what had caused it. Besides some heavy clothing they wouldn’t need until they got down into the higher latitudes, it held only those articles which, in addition to the shotgun, had to be sealed in port by customs—the shells; her cigarettes; John’s cigars; the medicine kit, because of the narcotics it contained; and several bottles of whisky and two or three of rum. Then the feeling was gone. The protective concentration closed in around her again, and she was moving ahead. She gathered up the box of shells, picked up a small paring knife from a galley drawer, and hurried back.

  It took several minutes to hack her way into the box. She extracted two of the shells and set the box on the deck under the bunk. She broke the gun at the breech with the lever, dropped them in, and closed it. She was fortunate in that her very lack of familiarity with guns spared her the deadly association of those three sounds linked in sequence—the toinnnk, toinnnk, of the shells dropping into the ends of the tubular air columns of the barrels, and the metallic click as the breech closed and locked.

  But she wasn’t so lucky with the blanket. Strangely, the blanket was worse now than the gun, and it might have stopped her except for the furious intensity of her concentration and the momentum she had already gathered. Because she knew what she had to do with it, and do immediately and without hesitation or thought; if she waited, she might never go up there at all, and the act would have been for nothing.

  She set the gun down on one of the sailbags, peeled the blanket from the bunk, and held it up before her by the corners with her face averted, like a fireman approaching a blaze behind a shield. The ocean of sickness beyond the bubble surged inward and threatened to collapse it, but she looked down at her feet, her mind shored up against everything but the problem, and decided she could get up the ladder this way and across the cockpit.

  She retrieved the gun, took the blanket in her other arm, and went out. The roaring in her head was louder now, so she could scarcely hear the engine. She was cold all over and wasn’t sure she was breathing at all; there seemed to be some tremendous weight pressing on her chest. She walked with a stiff-legged artificial gait, like a mechanical toy, fighting the rubbery weakness of her knees, but she was still going forward, still protected and invulnerable. She could see nothing on either side of her. Straight ahead, as if at the end of a long tunnel, the bright oblong patch of sunlight fell through the open hatch, sweeping back and forth across the ladder as Saracen rolled. She reached it. She stepped up on the first tread of the ladder and peered out.

  She could just see over the hatch coaming, and only his face was visible as he sat in the after end of the cockpit behind the wheel. He
was looking down into the compass, and his lips were moving, apparently without sound, though she didn’t know for sure because of the engine noise and that roaring in her ears. He glanced up then, straight into her eyes, but there was no recognition, no indication he even saw her. He looked back at the compass, his lips continuing to move. Somewhere inside her a voice was screaming: Now, now!

  She dropped the blanket beside her on the ladder and brought up the gun, pushing the safety button forward. The barrels reached up and out, resting on the coaming in front of her, and when she put her shoulder against the stock and sighted along them they were pointing just slightly to one side of his face. She moved them over, and when she closed her left eye they were lined up, foreshortened and centered on his forehead ten feet in front of her. She could no longer breathe at all. Her right index finger, like some great unwieldy sausage, came in against the gun, felt the forward edge of the trigger guard, slipped back around it, inside, and lay against the trigger. All she had to do was pull. She tried.

  She closed both eyes and let her head fall forward, wanting help from somewhere, but there was no help; she was alone, and if it was to be done she had to do it. When she opened her eyes and looked along the barrels again, the beautiful, hated, mad, impervious head was still there on the ends of them like a permanent decoration installed in a moment of gruesome whimsy by some gunsmith gone mad himself. She tried once more to pull the trigger, and then came down from the ladder with the gun, remembering just in time to push the safety back before she sank down at the foot of it. She couldn’t even cry. There were no tears left.

  In a few minutes she had strength enough again to gather up the gun and blanket and go back inside the forward cabin with them. She unloaded the gun, dropped it on the bunk, and put the two shells back in the box. That ended it. She knew now. Not even to save John’s life could she assassinate in cold blood a boy who didn’t know what he was doing.