The Lower Deep

by Hugh B. Cave

  George Benson knew Felix Abry personally—which was not always the case with the politicians who used his boat. Months ago, when George had answered St. Joe's ad for an experienced professional to teach its fishermen, Abry had flown to Mississippi to interview him and observe him in action. Abry's enthusiastic recommendation had resulted in George's landing the job.

  At fifty-seven, Felix Abry was a large, happy man with a bright future in St. Joe's political scheme of things—one day he might even be a candidate for president. His robust, loud-laughing wife, Jeanette, stood proudly beside him this morning as the craft headed for the old buccaneer island, Ile du Vent.

  With these two aboard George Benson's boat were two other guests quite different from them in origin and skin color, but close friends of theirs. Tall Jan Langer, born in Holland, managed the Plantation Margot, a sisal estate near Dame Marie of which Felix Abry was an important stockholder. Jan's plump and pretty Dutch wife, Elizabeth, though ten years younger than Jeanette Abry, was the St. Joseph woman's best friend.

  The four planned to explore the Isle of the Wind and return to Pointe Pierre the following day. A grand adventure, for though the island was now home to a few thousand St. Joe peasants, it was still roadless, primitive, and much the same as when the pirate brotherhood had used it for a base.

  As the sun rose behind her, the Ti Maman purred westward over a sea smooth as glass. Jan Langer said to his wife, "You won't be seasick today, sweetheart."

  "It was calm like this the last time," Elizabeth reminded him, referring to a day eight weeks before when they had been turned back by a sudden, violent storm. "It was like this for a long while, if you remember. Then—pow!"

  At the wheel, Felix Abry lowered the beer bottle from his mouth, and grinned. "That's the kind of ocean this is, Liz. You just never know."

  "Well, I hope it's on its best behavior today."

  The sea remained smooth and they were the only craft on its glistening surface as the Ti Maman droned on. The sun climbed a crimson sky and the air shed its nighttime chill. The man at the wheel opened another beer. His wife broke loudly into song, her voice as rich as when she had sung years ago in some of the capital's better night spots.

  "Good girl," Felix said, patting her bottom when the song ended. "Let's have another, hey? How about 'Caroline Acao'? You two back there, open up some beer for yourselves."

  Jan Langer said "Sure, Felix" and did so, but his wife wagged her head. "Not me, not yet," she said. "Not till I know for sure it won't get rough. If we run into one of those squalls again, I don't want any beer inside me this time, thank you very much."

  "Sissy," Felix jeered.

  "No, she's right," his wife said. "When you have a queasy stomach, it's better you watch it. You, you big slob"—affectionately she punched him in the ribs—"you could drink a case of rum and a hurricane wouldn't affect you."

  The Ti Maman hummed on. The sea stayed calm. Felix and Jan drank beer and Jeanette entertained with her lusty singing. Some of the songs were French, some were Creole: the Creole ones were both bawdier and more melodious. Elizabeth Langer alone worried about the weather and kept a watchful eye on the empty sea while longing for the drinks she denied herself.

  They had been out about forty minutes and were still loafing along, more interested in the beauty of the morning than in making time, when Elizabeth, suddenly frowning, pushed herself erect. "Hey!" she said. "What's that out there?"

  She pointed, and when the others looked where she was pointing, they too saw something in the water ahead.

  "Looks like a fish," Felix said. "Pretty big one. Hurt. Maybe a shark hit it."

  His wife said, "That's no fish, Felix!" and reached for binoculars. Peering through them, she said, "If that isn't a man swimming, I'm crazy. Here." She handed the glasses to Felix. "Look!"

  "For God's sake, it is! It's a white man, too!"

  "Naked," Jeanette said.

  "Yes, naked. How in hell did he get way out here? You suppose he fell off a boat?" Even while speaking, Felix was turning the craft and reducing speed so he could come alongside the swimmer without danger of running him down.

  "He couldn't have fallen off a boat in weather like this, Felix," Jan Langer said. "Not unless he was blind drunk. Even then, his mates could easily have picked him up."

  "Well, he sure as hell didn't swim out here," Felix said.

  The naked white man in the water was nearer now, and they could see he was near the end of his endurance. Yet he was actually trying to swim, not just to tread water and stay afloat.

  His arms rose and fell as though they were almost too heavy for him to lift. His feet moved even more slowly, scarcely turning up a disturbance in the smooth water. Apparently he was so intent on what he was doing, on attaining a goal of some sort, that he was unaware of the boat coming up behind him.

  "Hey!" Felix yelled. "You in the water there!" The swimmer seemed not to hear.

  "This is crazy," Felix said. "Jan, look. If I come alongside of him, you think you can lean over and grab him?"

  "I'1l try."

  "My God!" Elizabeth Langer suddenly cried out. "Look beyond him at the water!"

  Beyond him at the water? Yes. Something was happening there. A dimple had formed on the sea's glistening skin. Like a slowly opening eye it grew in diameter. Now it was a smooth, round hole some ten feet across, slowly revolving. Now twenty feet in diameter, and revolving more swiftly. Now thirty feet, and spinning like a whirlpool.

  Caught in it, the naked swimmer was a human fly being sucked down the drain of a monstrous bathtub. Those on the boat saw his face turn toward them in a grotesque mask of terror. With his last lungful of air he managed a feeble scream for help that keened across the water like a gull cry. Then he vanished.

  At that moment Ti Maman felt the pull from the whirlpool's rim, and Felix frantically threw the craft into reverse while his wife let out a scream of her own. But in watching the fate of the swimmer, Felix had waited too long. That awesome hole in the sea, its smooth sides spinning faster and faster, had trapped the boat in its ever-spreading suction.

  Despite the best her engine could do, she was drawn shuddering toward the edge of the funnel. Not so swiftly as the swimmer, not so easy a victim, but just as helpless. Just as surely doomed.

  Seeing there was no way he could reverse what was happening, the potential presidential candidate let go the wheel and flung his arms protectively around his wife. His wife suddenly stopped screaming and clung to him, seemingly trying, in the moment or two left to them, to make her body one with his.

  Jan Langer, who had been leaning over the side to reach for the swimmer, struggled to his feet but lost his footing. He fell to his knees again and struck his head against a corner of the metal icebox that held the beer. With a deep gash over one eye spurting blood, he staggered to his feet like a drunken man just as the deck suddenly and violently became vertical under him. His eyes were glassy even before he lost his balance again and sprawled overboard.

  His wife, wide-eyed with horror, ran forward in a hopeless attempt to reach for him. But the Ti Maman lurched a second time, even more violently, and with hands flailing in an effort to grab at something to stop her, she followed her husband screaming into the sea.

  With this difference: He had hit the water unconscious and helpless. She thrashed about like a hooked fish.

  And now George Benson's beloved boat reached the edge of the vortex and began a slow but inevitable descent into the depths. With the Abrys still on their feet and clinging to each other in silent despair, she sank lower and lower into that shiny black throat until the sea swallowed her—and them.

  The whirling of the water slowly ceased. The surface became smooth again. But the Ti Maman and three of her four people were gone. Only one had escaped.

  Elizabeth Langer found herself alone in calm water sometime later and remembered with startling clarity everything that had happened. She told the story to one Lulio Bazile, the aging owner-captain of the cargo
craft Celeste, when he and his partner found her half swimming, half floating, and close to drowning in an otherwise empty sea that Sunday morning, and picked her up. Based at Cap Matelot, the Celeste was headed homeward from Ile du Vent.

  The woman was obviously out of her mind, Bazile and his partner agreed. Her story was crazy. But not knowing what else to do, they turned in at Pointe Pierre with her, and there, because she certainly needed a doctor, Bazile ran up through town to the home of the well-known Dr. Louis Clermont.

  Clermont was having a bath when his caller knocked. A Sunday bath at his bachelor establishment was a ritual to be carefully set up and blissfully enjoyed, because on weekdays he seldom had time for more than a brief shower.

  A major part of the ritual was the preparation of a generous quantity of his own special Rum St. Joseph Manhattan, to be consumed while he sat in the tub and let his mind wander over the problems of the week just ended.

  This Sunday he was thinking of George Benson's tongue-biting, the bewildering change in Ginny Jourdan's personality, and that peculiar business of Paul Henninger's finding himself naked in the sea—if one could believe Paul's account of that. The pounding on the door was almost a relief.

  With a towel twisted around him, Clermont let his caller in and listened to what the man told him. Knowing Elizabeth Langer, he said with a scowl, "You sure she's not just drunk?"

  The Celeste's owner replied in Creole that he personally thought the woman must be drunk, but she insisted she wasn't. "She said she didn't have even one drink, Doctor." Shaking his head, he narrated again, in more detail, how he had found her swimming alone far out at sea.

  That did it. The fact that Elizabeth, like fat Paul Henninger, had been out there alone in a watery nowhere made Clermont's mind up for him. "Okay, just let me get some clothes on."

  When they arrived at the Pointe Pierre pier, the Langer woman was still in the cargo boat's cabin, lying white-faced on a bunk with a ragged blanket over her. Beside her stood young Lieutenant Etienne of the Armée de St. Joseph.

  "Hello, Roger," Clermont said. "What are you doing here?"

  "This fellow called to me as I was passing." The lieutenant indicated Bazile’s partner, standing nearby with a look of fright on his face. "Doctor, she says she was with her husband and a couple from St. Joe City on George Benson's boat. Says the boat was sucked under or something. I guess you know what I'm thinking."

  "I suppose." Clermont went to his knees beside the bunk and leaned over his patient. There was a wild look in Elizabeth Langer's hazel eyes. A look of shock or terror, he guessed it was. A hand came out from under the blanket and fastened on his wrist.

  "I wasn't drinking, Dr. Clermont! Please! You have to believe me! You have to send someone back there for the others!"

  Clermont couldn't smell any liquor, even when he leaned closer. He knew her, though, and said quietly, "Come on now, Elizabeth."

  "It's true!" The words came out in a kind of chatter, as though she were chilled. "I was afraid I'd get seasick again. The last time I went out, I was so sick I spoiled the day for everyone. Today I didn't drink even a beer, I swear it. Oh, my God, Doctor—Jan's gone! What I'm telling you is true! Every word of it! Somebody has to go back there and find him!"

  If she had drunk anything, the smell was gone now, Clermont had to admit to himself. "All right, we'll find your husband, Elizabeth. Get hold of yourself now. Etienne will send a boat out there while I take you home and find someone to look after you." Getting an arm around her shoulders, he helped her to her feet and out of the cabin.

  On deck he turned to the lieutenant. "You want to talk to her anymore, Roger?"

  "It can wait, Doctor."

  "You will look for the others, won't you? How will you do it?" The army post in Dame Marie was too small to have a boat of its own, and the army's boat at Port Roche was too far away.

  Etienne glanced at the various craft tied up at the pier. All those in port at the moment were sail-powered. He turned to Lulio Bazile whose Celeste, on the deck of which they stood, had an engine. "You must take me there, Lulio."

  The fisherman's eyes bulged. "No, no, Lieutenant! If what the woman says is true, we could be caught in—in—"

  "In what?"

  "A whirlpool, she called it!"

  "Compère, you've been fishing these waters . . . How old are you? Sixty?"

  "Sixty-four."

  "You've been fishing these waters twice as long as I've been alive, almost. Have you ever in your life encountered a whirlpool out there?"

  "No, but—"

  "A squall, yes. A waterspout, maybe. But a thing that goes spinning around and around and sucks a boat down? Don't be childish."

  "But can he find the place?" Clermont asked. "Can you, Lulio?"

  "I don't think so! No, of course not! How would I know where—"

  "When you picked the woman up, you were coming from where?"

  "The island. Ile du Vent."

  "And going where?"

  "Home."

  "So then, you know the course you were on and can return to where you picked the woman up, no? Close to there, at any rate. So that is what we will do." The problem solved, Etienne briskly nodded. "And from there we will go around and around in ever-widening circles, and see what we find."

  The frightened fisherman made one last effort. "Lieutenant, the woman says she was swimming a long time before I found her. The currents out there could have carried her far from where the boat sank!"

  "And perhaps, compère, the boat did not go down at all, and we'll find it. People make mistakes about the sea sometimes, especially when they are not familiar with it. So come."

  Louis Clermont said, "If you want to talk to Mrs. Langer again, Roger, she'll be at home." And to the woman as he walked her along the pier: "My car is at my house. Can you make it that far?"

  "Yes. Oh, yes! Don't leave me here!"

  Keeping an arm around her, he led her up through the Sunday-quiet town, and she whispered her thanks as he eased her onto the front seat of his old Renault. Then she sat silent, staring straight ahead with wide, empty eyes, as he drove the nine miles to Plantation Margot.

  There he faced an impasse. The Langers' maid had been given the day off, the Langers' bungalow was locked, the key was in Jan's pocket, and Jan was—where? In typical fashion, Clermont solved the problem by picking up a piece of two-by-four in the yard and smashing a windowpane so he could reach in and unlock the window. After hoisting himself over the sill with a good deal of grunting, he opened the front door from the inside.

  "Come." He led the stricken woman to her bedroom, helped her onto the bed, and drew up a chair. Getting her to talk might be helpful, he decided. "All right now. Suppose you start at the beginning, girl, and tell me exactly what happened."

  Staring up at him with eyes that were wells of terror, she whispered, "Do I have to?"

  "Be a good idea, I think. You just concentrate on it for a minute—get your story together—while I phone someone to come stay with you."

  He went to the phone and made his call. When he returned, Elizabeth was in the midst of her story, as though he had never left.

  "Then I saw this man swimming."

  "You what? Hold on now!" Clermont sat at the edge of the bed and looked hard at her face while reaching for her hand. "You saw what?"

  "I saw a man swimming. Naked. I yelled to the others and pointed, and we all saw him. It was while we were trying to pick him up that the hole in the sea opened and we were sucked into it."

  "You saw a naked man swimming, out there in the middle of nowhere?" Clermont was thinking of Paul Henninger and his story of waking up naked in the sea. "Elizabeth, are you sure of this?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "It isn't something you heard somewhere?"

  "No, no! It happened! When the hole opened, we were almost close enough for Jan to grab him."

  "What became of him?"

  "I—don't know. The boat began spinning and Jeanette was screaming . . ." Her
voice trailed off into a session of sobbing. But after a while, with no intrusion from Clermont, she stopped sobbing and looked at him again. "I wasn't drunk," she said pleadingly. "I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. I didn't have one single drink, even."

  "Why didn't you tell Lieutenant Etienne about this man you saw swimming?"

  "I—guess I forgot."

  "You did see him, though? You're sure of that?"

  "I tell you we all saw him. We talked about where he could have come from—if he could have fallen off a boat or something. Jan said he couldn't have fallen off a boat in such calm water unless he was drunk. Please, Doctor Clermont." She reached for his hand. "I have to stop thinking or I'll go crazy! Give me something to make me sleep now? Please?"

  "Just one more question. This man you saw—was he black or white?"

  "He was white. Doctor, please!"

  Clermont gave her a tranquilizer, watched her go to sleep, then moved to the living room to wait for the woman he had phoned. While waiting, he tried to make sense out of what he'd been told.

  A white man swimming naked in the sea just before a "hole" opened in the water and sucked the boat down, with three persons on board?

  Paul Henninger, that overweight but once physically fit Belgian soccer player, waking up naked in the sea, far from land, not even knowing how he'd gotten there?

  Ginny Jourdan discovered naked on the beach at Anse Douce, just "looking at the sea"?

  What the hell was going on?

  Of course, Henninger might be lying to cover up a visit to the town's red-light district, as Juan Mendoza believed he was. And Elizabeth Langer could be simply hysterical. But the Jourdan girl hadn't denied her part in it, had she?

  "Jesus," Clermont muttered.

  A vehicle came clanking into the yard, and he stood up, knowing it was the ancient pickup he was expecting. At the front door he shook hands with a solemn, middle-aged St. Joseph woman with a battered suitcase, and called her Lucy. Her name was Lucille. Her husband, Metellus, now at the pickup's wheel, owned the only vehicle of that type in Dame Marie and earned a living of sorts by hauling fish in it to Cap Matelot.

  Having waved to the driver and watched the pickup depart, Clermont told the woman what had happened and advised her to plan on staying a few days. Then he said, "I'll keep in touch," and drove home.