Firefly Gadroon

by Jonathan Gash

  Aghast, I heard them talking about fog outside as their footsteps sounded above. I even heard Jimmie the goon ask Devvo for a match and Devvo’s reply, ‘No smoking till we’re outside. We don’t want Old Bill finding clues all over the place.’ He didn’t believe me, the moron, the sadistic killer.

  The steps sounded fainter. I thought, this can’t be happening to me. Not to me. It can’t happen. People will come. Devvo will turn back. Maudie will arrive. Dolly will bring the police. The Navy’ll see the boat . . .

  Then they had gone and I was where I’d always feared. Finished.

  Chapter 16

  Darkness is the worst. Well, second worst. Second to being entombed.

  I’m not scared of dark places. No, honestly I’m not. No more than anyone else. And solitude’s a precious commodity, if you like that sort of thing. But being at the bottom of the sea bed sent me demented. I sweated and shivered, shouting and pleading though Devvo and his goon were no longer in earshot. I yelled incoherent explanations of the chrysoberyl, promises, bribes, anything.

  Sobbing in fear, I hurled myself repeatedly at the ceiling, foolishly hoping to reach the rectangular opening’s margin. Once I even thought I touched it but nearly broke my bloody ankle falling on the rock. I battered upwards with the ladder. I begged and pleaded, wept and screeched abuse. In those few minutes I regressed from Homo sapiens through a few million years, finishing up a shambling whining hulk whimpering and scratching in a cave. I became again a feeble thing of reflex, Homo neanderthalis, an animal with less brain than Germoline. Utterly disgusting. Fright made me pee repeatedly, hardly a drop every time. I almost knocked myself senseless against the projecting slab. I cursed it soundly, regaining my old anger. Stupid bloody army engineers, leaving one great slab like that sticking out. You could brain yourself on it if you weren’t careful. And what for? Typical, just typical. You’d think they’d have just built this lunatic place and got the hell out.

  Then gradually I was brought back to my senses. Perhaps it was rage at the fort’s builders. Or at Devvo. Or at the plight I was in. Or just me. Or at everybody in good old East Anglia beering up and snogging and going about their lawful business, selfish swine, with me left to die miles offshore out there – here – under the ocean.

  ‘Oooh,’ I moaned, terrified.

  Whatever else, I had to keep that horrible thought from my mind. Ignore the reality of cold, of silence and darkness. Think. Think.

  Think of Germoline, waiting out there by Drummer’s shed, trusting in me to come back loaded with antiques. Think of the engineers under the impetus of war, slogging night and day in the cold and mud out here. I sat on the fallen ladder and slowly and ever so slightly began to cerebrate.

  My head was still ringing from catching it on the projecting slab. What was it I’d just said to myself? . . . You’d have thought they’d just have built this lunatic place and got the hell out? But they hadn’t. They hadn’t. They’d most carefully made, deep down at the bottom of one supporting pillar, a single projecting slab. Apparently for nothing. Nothing could lean on it. A winch bar, then? No. Nothing could be winched up to it – you build winches at the top of places, not in cellars. Some architectural necessity, then . . . but what? I know nothing about architecture, especially of sea forts, but no amount of thinking could explain the projection. The fort itself was huge. Its four supporting pillars were huge as well. This projecting slab, big as it seemed, was relatively small compared to the fort.

  A strange unease settled in my belly. Whereas I’d been scared out of my skull a few minutes before, a coldness came in me now, fear of a totally different kind. Something horrid underlay all this. Something old man Hepplestone possibly knew about and which was gradually starting to dawn on me. My white-hot panic vanished. My mind plodded on to a clear frosty logic.

  A construction team, labouring hard out in a dangerous ocean, struggling to erect this sea fort in the hectic rush to war, doesn’t pause to build something useless a million fathoms down. Local legend says they lost a man a day from drowning or injury on every single fort. Add to that the bombing, the worry about enemy ships . . . I was suddenly too scared to move. Counterbalanced. Exactly what was counterbalanced?

  ‘Keep calm.’ My voice echoed funereally, scaring me worse. Hepplestone’s cage. You pressed it down, and a bit of the floor had pivoted aside. Counterbalanced?

  The way down had been carefully locked so that I’d had to improvise a battering ram to get in. And only the C.O. or his aide were allowed down, even though it led nowhere. Cellars never go anywhere. Everybody knows that. The glamorous image of a retreating swordsman came back to me again, retreating stair by stair. Suppose the fort was stormed. A brave C.O. might want to sacrifice everything to save a fortress falling into an enemy’s hands so close to shore. Or he might have orders to . . . to . . . Jesus. I swallowed, my throat dry. No wonder it was locked, the doors solid metal. Something was mined, or self-destructive. And I was in it. And I knew now what was counterbalanced. It was the slab. Somehow it pivoted. And it could be done by one person, ‘The C.O. or authorized Acting C.O.’, the notice had said. Or. Therefore not both. Therefore even a knackered Lovejoy could unbalance it on his own, after which . . .

  I went ‘Oooh’, sitting still, frightened to move a muscle. Supposing I did manage to turn it. What the hell happened then? Maybe it would prove a way out – into the frigging sea. Who needed that, for gawd’s sake? I’d seen enough films to know that the bloody sea’s crammed with sharks and tentacled monsters. A pivoting slab in a wall would let the whole frigging North Sea into my black prison – definitely bad news. Worse, supposing it did let me out? What else did it do? That ghastly feeling of being in a mine recurred. How long did mines take to blow up once you set them ticking? Or do mines only tick in comics?

  I tried to talk myself out of it. ‘It’s all make believe,’ I said aloud. Sweating clammily, I brought up, perfectly sound reasons for the War Department being too careful to leave sinister explosives in our trusty old sea forts.

  Aren’t they?

  One thing I could do, meanwhile. If I was going anywhere I’d at least take a piece of the chrysoberyl with me. The ladder would help to bash a piece of the scaggy rock floor free. Careful, though, to stay away from the projecting slab in case I unbalanced something in the darkness.

  I got down on my knees and began feeling the rock. My torch was broken. I’d have given anything for my pencil torch. I laid the ladder pointing at where I remembered the projecting slab to be and took bearings from that, using feel. Then I quartered the cellar in my mind and set to, my fingers fumbling across the rock inch by inch.

  Chrysoberyl looks like nothing on earth, just rock with faint greens and yellows and the odd brownish-creamy material. You feel for smooth areas the size of your fingernail, especially where they end in crazed bits as if somebody had criss-crossed the rock with a file. There were several excrescences feeling like this. I finally chose one about a yard from where I guessed the room’s centre was.

  A small fissure extended to a depth of about my hand to one side of the rock piece I’d chosen. It was as wide as a fist at the top, just big enough to ram my broken torch in and leave it sticking upright. The ladder was easy to lift but difficult to keep on its side edge. I held one end as high as I could, over the torch. I stepped aside and let go. One would be the hammer, the other the nail. It took me a dozen or so goes before the ladder’s plunging metal side hit the torch with a dull clack and I heard the chrysoberyl splinter. A few chips spattered about my cell but I could ignore those. The biggest piece was about a couple of pounds, an unimaginable quantity. I got it into my lap, gloating like a delirious miser, though God knows what I had to be pleased about.

  It was a winner. Irregular as hell, the lump had nine facets with smooth silky flat surfaces. Three of them led into gritty crazed patches. I could feel the delectable richness of the beryllium salt and its violet lustre. Supposed to be unlucky for sailors, it is none the less sought aft
er, and the clearer transparent stones are very valuable. Most come from the Urals, Ceylon and parts of Africa, with a few from Colorado. A single 10 carat natural would buy a family house. Not antique, but I was in no position to argue against free wealth.

  The question was whether to wait and rest or to waggle that slab and hope for the best. But wait for what? Death in this cellar? Devvo would return my boat, simply make sure it was found tied up at Terry’s when dawn broke. Everybody would reach the same conclusion as Maslow – that Lovejoy had scarpered with a load of nicked antiques. Devvo would be thoughtful enough to leave a giveaway antique in the boat. I was done for in any case. Nobody would come after me. That was the truth.

  I put the chrysoberyl piece in my pocket and, hands reaching out in front, stumbled carefully across the uneven floor towards the wall where the slab was.

  I knew that you breathe out when rising in deep water. How many steps had I descended? Maybe about ten flights or so, say, a dozen steps to each flight. Say about eight inches a step. That’s ten times twelve times eight over twelve, in feet. I worked it out as best my incoherent mind would allow. Eighty feet. Christ, it seemed a hell of a lot of water. I resolutely avoided working it out in fathoms. I’d learned too many grim fathomy poems in school to do that. Fathoms always sound to me distances you sink, not distances you float – and I badly wanted to float.

  My heart was banging almost audibly and my palms were hot and dry. The cellar was freezing. I’d been a fool not to bring Tinker. He’d have been useless because he’s always even more scared than I am but at least he could have kept watch. I’d been thick, as usual. I peed against the wall. There was enough water out there without carrying some with me. I undid my shoes, took them and my socks off and stripped to my underpants, replacing only my jacket. The lump of chrysoberyl stayed with me. At least human beings float. I hesitated. One more worry. Is there such a thing as a non-floating man? If so, I was bound to be it. Oh God.

  I felt the projecting slab. The floor beneath it seemed solid rock, like the rest. Supposing it didn’t move? Supposing it wasn’t the slab which was counterbalanced but some other thing elsewhere? Fear made me reach out and pull the slab the instant the thought came. And I was engulfed in water, roaring, howling water.

  I was buffeted and knocked, pulled and swirled. Water forced into my nostrils. I hadn’t got a decent breath in. I tried to open my eyes but saw nothing. I didn’t even know if they were open. I was spinning. Something seemed to have hold of my right arm. I screamed into rushing bubbles, threshing and kicking in the vortex, perhaps some instinct not to die from nitrogen bubbles in your blood, diver’s disease. I didn’t know which way was up. All I could hear was the terrible rushing noise, hissing like a steam train. Things seemed to keep on pulling at me, my arms and legs and shoulders. I kept trying to kick clear, as though at clutching enemies, but the water tugged a million ways at once. A minute was too much. I needed to breathe but to do so would mean drowning. I kicked madly, flailing arms and legs and doubling my body in agony. My head wanted to burst.

  Something belted my neck and scraped my shoulder. I clouted it back, not feeling the pain. I felt a hard smooth surface and me sliding along it curving upwards. How did I know it was upwards? Breath came into me, pressing me out and setting me choking. I choked and retched and choked.

  And floated.

  It was odd, that first breath. The air was curiously warm. I wasn’t able to believe it actually was air. For a moment I wondered if this was drowning, that this stuff I was sucking in and gushing out was actually water. The fact that I was floundering dizzily beside one of the great pillars and on the sea surface, being lifted and lurched tantalizingly near to the metal stanchions, seemed somehow irrelevant for an instant. I realized I was delirious for a few seconds. Reflexes kept me surfaced. Not drowning but floundering. Great bubbles heaved and popped about me. The trouble was I couldn’t see far.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ a voice shouted. Devvo. I couldn’t judge the direction.

  My choking stopped but I was splashing like a flounder.

  ‘Some boat, maybe.’ That was Devvo’s goon, breathless from lumbering the antiques.

  ‘What d’you expect me to do, in this frigging fog?’

  ‘Can it or I’ll can you.’ Devvo.

  Fog? A wave slammed me against the pillar. I was lucky not to be brained. Fog. That explained the horns from passing ships. It also explained why the sea was not running murderously high. Thick fog, low waves, they say on the coast. Noises sounded close to, thumps and a creaking, presumably Devvo’s boat loading up. I peered stupidly about, lifted and sloshed down by the swell. As if anybody could check position from distant lightships in a fog with a ten-yard visibility. My mind was too stupefied. Simply to strike out might be suicidal because I could be swimming away from the fort. Above and around a great greyness. No lights. Merely me heaving near a vast pillar in the endless bloody ocean. Distant foghorns wailed again, making me shiver more.

  Driven by fear, I told myself angrily, cerebrate, you idle sod. Which way? I turned my head. Foghorns. Where else but further out to sea? You don’t get ships on shore. So left was land, right was east. I listened, tugged and shoved by the heaving sucking sea. An intermittent shushing sound came from the right. Rocks, the ridge protruding from the sea between the seaward pillars. I drew breath and let go, flailing towards the shushing. It was less than a length and took me years.

  I don’t even remember reaching the rocks or finding the rope. Maybe I blacked out or, knowing me, fainted from relief. Blokes shouting brought me to, a shout of directions and an insult.

  ‘Last case, Devvo.’

  ‘Thank Christ. I’m frigging frozen.’

  ‘Slowly, you stupid get.’

  My boat. I couldn’t see it but there was a rope in my hands, and I was sprawled on sea-washed rock. Only a terror-stricken idiot like me ties eleven knots in a single rope to moor a boat. I grasped it one-handed and tugged. Something out in the grey darkness nudged my leg. I just kept from screaming and leaping away. Surely to God after all this it had to be my boat and not a shark.

  I stuck my foot out at the sea and hit something solid, but which moved as a body, undulating with the sea. Benign but definitely there. Like an ape, I swung one-handed, pulling like mad.

  It made me remember sharks again. I splashed like a drowning rat, finally getting one leg over the brass rail and feeling my way back until I reached the glass windows. I was safe. Nearly frozen to death, but in my own boat. I should have danced with delighted relief. Instead I retched up the other half of the sea.

  It can only have been a few minutes. I’d cut the ropes first with the ship’s knife and pushed away from the fort’s pillars before scrambling into some clothes. The sea drift seemed to be swirling past me away from the sound of Devvo’s men. I judged it would take me away from the fort pretty quickly without the engine. I was useless, unable to stop sicking up water and shivering.

  I counted to five hundred before finding a handlamp and looking round the cabin. That was probably far enough. The engine caught first go. I don’t know why that’s always more astonishing than it would be in cars but it is. I found myself grinning in a kind of astonished ecstasy. I could simply go home if I wanted. I was free. Out and free. There was a quarter-bottle of brandy in a cupboard but I didn’t feel like celebrating that much. I let the engine idle while I did exercises to thaw out, and sussed out the radar. Fog means radar. The fort stands a good three miles from the coastal sea lanes, and about five from the Sands lightship, so there was time despite the speed of the sea.

  You switch on and a greenish radius appears, belting round and round this little telly screen. The whole cabin becomes ghostly, something out of a horror film. It leaves a faint green outline, the shape of the coast. You can alter the scale with a few knobs but I didn’t touch those after one hesitant go, scared to damage it and finish up blind in the fog. There were several extra dots about that weren’t on the map. I felt terr
ific, really proud of being in charge of my own destiny. I could head for the estuary, there on the screen, any time I wanted. But I didn’t.

  I did a few turns, using minimal throttle for quietness and watching the small screen. It was quite simple. Turn one way and the screen stayed conscientiously drawing the coast always in one direction. By this time I’d identified one green mark as the fort. If I watched it carefully it would show Devvo’s boat too as it pulled away. I hadn’t a clue what I’d do then.

  The centre of the radius on the greenish screen practically joined to the fort’s dot before I heard it, that terrible swooshing and slurping noise of the sea against the fort’s pillars. Cutting the engine down, so as to just about keep me stationary as far as I could tell, I settled down to wait. Warmer now, and thinking at last. Thinking and listening. Devvo couldn’t have left yet. I heard a couple of shouts from up ahead.

  I honestly swear I intended no harm. Cross my heart. Honestly, I mean it. I was so thankful to have got out of that great monster I’d have been daft to go risking myself again, just for vengeance. Vengeance is a motive to be avoided. Too costly. Probably I was waiting to see what would happen to the antiques.

  I found a score of plastic-wrapped pork pies in the diminutive fridge, Terry’s boatyard’s idea of nautical cuisine. It was also mine. I wolfed six and polluted the North Sea with wrappers.

  Sailors trust radar. I’d heard them talk about it often enough. So when I saw a small green dot leave the solitary larger dot I decided I’d have to follow across the oily sea. It could only be Devvo’s boat, loaded with its crated cargo. It stopped for a full five minutes, then moved a few hundred yards and stopped again. I followed it but cleverly kept at the same distance. The screen helped me to judge, and finally the dot began to move steadily. I couldn’t hear an engine, so they couldn’t hear mine. I followed, honestly still intending no harm. I’d be the perfect bystander.