“Oh yes.”
He pressed the button of the Garmin screen in the doghouse, since the one in the cockpit stopped working during the hurricane.
“Blast!” he said. “This one is now giving up the ghost as well. It’s giving me a lot of stripes and stuff.” He slapped it but the screen refused to settle. “Let’s try the one at the nav station.”
“Something is very wrong,” he said, when that Garmin screen, which showed all information relevant to the navigation of the boat on one screen, was exactly the same.
“It’s clear that we have an electrical fault,” he continued. “You know, water came in everywhere. There is most probably a short in the system somewhere. It’s most annoying. First the radar, now this. It means that we will have to sail blind, or by my smartphone.”
“Your office computer was still working earlier, wasn’t it?”
“Oh yes, but I switched it off to conserve power.” He laughed. “I can see where you are going with this,” he said to Madeleine. “You are trying to scare me after your stories the other day of … what was it again?”
“The grey mist or electronic fog.”
“But this can be explained. We had a lot of water onto everything and it is perfectly normal for some of the electronics to have given up. Perhaps the sailing computer is just low on power. In fact, that clearly is the solution. The batteries have tanked at last. Why am I always surrounded by people who pull practical jokes on me? Good one, Madeleine!”
Madeleine leaned over and switched on the SSB radio set. It lighted up and crackled loudly. Then they heard a voice. The channel was in use. It sounded like a Japanese talking to another Japanese. Probably a fisherman talking to his home base.
“Not all power is gone,” she said.
“I’ll check on my computer,” said Grant and disappeared into his office. “Damn,” he said, “I just get white screens. This can be serious. In fact, it is serious. Let me think.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “The radios are working but not the Garmin or the computers in my office. How is that possible? These things are supposed to have their own batteries.” He made another check and found the computers this time completely dead.
“Add in the drill that slowed down unexpectedly and the compass that is rotating madly,” said Madeleine.
They climbed up to the deck and their eyes were drawn to the compass. It was still spinning.
“I think it is spinning faster,” said Madeleine.
“Funny to see it like that,” said Grant and hit the instrument with his hand. He took a spanner from the toolbox and hit it again, harder this time, but there was no change. He looked around in the cockpit for something heavier to hit it with.
“Perhaps you should not do that,” said Madeleine.
“Why not?”
“Because you might break it. It reminds me of the Marie Celeste. Have you heard of her?”
“Vaguely.”
“She was not sailing through the Triangle, but way north from here. My science teacher, Mr Hall, however, thinks that she might have had a Triangle experience. He says all the signs indicate this as a probability, including a smashed compass.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, Mr Hall thinks that the Triangle phenomenon is not stable. It can move outside of the accepted borders. He thinks that, just for a short time, it might have drifted northward, where the Marie Celeste passed through.”
“What happened to her? Wasn’t she some sort of ghost ship?”
“She was found sailing toward Gibraltar, but there was nobody on board. There were many theories as to what had happened to the captain, his family and the seven crew members, but nobody could ever say for sure what had happened. What made the mystery so intriguing was that their departure was apparently so sudden, as if they simply disappeared in thin air.”
“I guess the possibility of a piratical attack was investigated?”
“Oh, yes, especially since she carried alcohol in her holds. There was no sign of a violent take-over, however, or a struggle amongst the crew for that matter. What made me think of the Marie Celeste was that the compass was shattered in the binnacle, as if somebody had hit it, exactly like you were just doing just now with this one.”
“For what reason?”
“Perhaps for exactly the same reason you just hit yours. To stop it from spinning. That is what Mr Hall guessed, anyway.”
“It’s nothing but a coincidence. So what does he say about the crew’s disappearance anyway? That they dissolved in the mist?”
“He has a theory that relates to the fact that there was a rope trailing behind the ship and the ship’s longboat was missing.”
“So they climbed into the longboat and tied themselves to the ship. Why?”
“He thinks they were scared of something.”
“Of the mist? How would getting into a longboat help them?”
“He thinks that a sailor went up a mast and made a discovery.”
“Which was?”
“That there was a mist that enveloped the boat, just like ours, but that it was not a general mist. It only clung the boat itself. The top of the main mast or of all the masts were sticking out of it and he realised that when he climbed up there.”
“I see where you are going with this. You want me to climb up the mast for nothing. I’m not going to. I really don’t think anything is amiss. We just need to replace some computer equipment, that’s all.”
“I’m more than a little worried here, Grant. Aren’t you? Just climb up there and have a look. At least then we will know.”
“It might not tell us anything,” said Grant. “Sometimes the mist is low but sometimes it can be a hundred metres high.” He took a deep breath and continued with finality. “You know what, we need to get this rudder hung as well. We’ve been sitting here a long time now. How about I climb up after we’ve finished with the rudder. It will only take another two hours or so. You need to give me a hand.” He fished the file from a pocket of his shorts.
“What if something happens before we are done?” asked Madeleine, not moving. “Something had happened to people after they had witnessed these very same things. We know that.”
Grant studied his crew for a moment. “You mean you do. On the other hand … I’m not going to fight with you over this,” he said. “The most important thing on a boat is not the equipment anyway. It is the quality of the spirit between the crew. I know how important this is to you. Let’s go.” He found his climbing harness and strapped it on.
He hopped onto the main boom and then caught a halyard above his head in the jumar clamps. “And I thought I was done with this,” he said as he moved his feet into the straps and pushed up with his legs. He took his first break only ten metres up. Two days before he could do fifteen. Once again he regretted letting himself go while he partook of the finer pleasures of St Martin. Sailing can be terribly demanding on the body and you needed to be fit. He sat back in the canvas harness and held on to the mast. The mist was so thick that he could only barely make out Madeleine where she stood on deck. He waved an arm through the soup around him. He had seen fog of a more brilliant white. This one was more mayonnaise-like. He took a deep breath to get the smell of it but it was odourless. Then he pumped upwards once more. He was certainly not scared. This was just something to get behind him so that he could continue with the assembly of the new rudder. His whole perspective changed, however, just before he reached the top of the mast.
“Hey, Madeleine!” he called.
“I can’t see you but I can hear you,” she answered from below.
“I’m out of the mist, but it is very strange. It’s as if the boat is wrapped in a ball of cotton wool. I can clearly see the ocean all around us.”
“Isn’t that what I told you?” said the voice from below. “It’s what I suspected.”
He rappelled down inside seconds, going from bright sunshine into a world where everything was a consistent dirty grey, all the way down to
the deck.
“You know I don’t believe in this stuff, so you have to be careful with me now, but what, according to your stories, happens next?”
“Either the mist leaves us or it doesn’t.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Then I suppose we die.”
“How does that happen? I don’t feel anything.”
“From the stories that I remember it all happens in a flash, in mid-sentence. It’s been witnessed by others who were in radio contact with people who were in the mist when they disappeared.”
“This mist ends only a few metres beyond the stern,” he said. “I could see our safety buoy bobbing in the sunshine behind us. That could be the safest place to be.”
“The Marie Celeste again. How do we get there?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t have a dinghy or a life raft left. We are basically stuck on the boat.”
“Which may disappear any second.”
“Let me get this straight. Right now this grey mist is sucking the energy out of everything on this yacht, including us, up to the point where we will simply implode, disappear into a black hole?”
“That’s what they say.”
Grant looked at his hands. There was nothing wrong – yet.
“I won’t give up like this,” he said. “There must be a way out. You’d better tell me every story that you know.”
“I told you the stories just a few days ago. What more do you want to know?”
“Anything that could help us get out of this cocoon. Tell me about the people who were in this situation but who escaped.”
“There was the ship pulling the barge, of which I told you. They escaped by simply going full steam ahead. Eventually the mist, or electronic fog as Mr Hall called it, simply disappeared.”
“We are stuck,” said Grant. “We cannot use our engine because the diesel has been contaminated. Not even the sails will work, because there is no wind.”
“Perhaps you could call for help with the radio.”
“And say what? I’m not even sure that I believe this myself.”
“Help might come too late anyway,” said Madeleine. “And it might attack whoever comes as well.”
“Who else escaped?”
“Some aeroplanes flew out of it. I told you those stories as well. There is a guy who flew out of it twice.”
“We are not a plane. What other stories do you have? Your uncle disappeared when?”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“Who else was fairly recent?”
“There was the case of two men who took their yacht out one evening just before Christmas to look at the lights of Miami. They radioed that something had bumped them from below that jammed their rudder so that they would need a tow. That was the last that anybody had heard of them. They did not respond to radio calls after that. The Coast Guard was at their location twenty minutes later but there was no sign of them or the boat. Not then, not ever. As with the other boats and planes, not even debris was found. Why it interested me was that this yacht also had built-in buoyancy, just like my uncle’s ski-boat. It could not sink. The Coast Guard searched right through the night and six more days on that location and downstream along the current. They did not find as much as a life jacket.”
“OK, what else?”
“I don’t know, Grant. Two submarines also disappeared but what does it help you?”
“Well, maybe it is useful to know that it operates under the surface, on the surface and in the air. There is just no escape, unless you move sideways fast. I remember you saying that this is a vortex thing, caused by extreme meteorological conditions.”
“That is one theory.”
“It makes perfect sense. You have to actually live through a hurricane to understand the incredible violence in it. Some limit somewhere is bound to be crossed. When you say that this is only one theory, what else is there?”
“Only one more that I know of, which goes like this. There are reports of ships that came through here that had engine trouble and became becalmed like us now. In the silence the sailors heard singing.”
“Singing?”
“Yes, singing by mournful African voices. Some people could hear it very clearly. It gave rise to this alternative theory.”
“Which is?”
“In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many slave ships passed through these waters. Since it was not long before the ships would disembark their slaves, the captains would seek out the old and the sick and throw them overboard. They would then claim from insurance and make a tidy sum of money. The story is that there were some African sorcerers amongst these slaves that were thrown overboard. While they and their companions were being ripped to pieces by the sharks they, or he or she, pronounced a curse on all shipping that passed through here. The grey mist and its effects are all the result of that curse.”
“You cannot expect me to believe in sorcerers. It’s the stuff you find in that Harry Potter movie you mentioned the other day.”
“I’m only telling you how the people of the Caribbean see it. Did you know that almost all Caribbean people are of African descent?”
“Yes, that’s common knowledge. What is the point?”
“An important one. The major belief system on the islands is Vodun, which comes from Africa.”
“You mean Voodoo.”
“The Voodoo that you see in the movies is only a very small part of it. Vodun is the ancient African belief in a Creator and subordinate spirits or sons, which is not unlike Christianity and which is why the Vodun faith was to an extent easily absorbed by the Catholic faith. People of the Caribbean pray to the Saints but some of their Saints are actually Vodun personae.”
“What has this got to do with the electronic fog?”
“I’m trying to explain to you how I as a Catholic understand the way people believe on the islands.”
“How they believe in sorcerers?”
“Yes, because we know them in our own society. It works like this. Every person, according to Vodun, has an external spirit attached to him or her. Most spirits are good spirits, but some, only a small number, are bad. These are the spirits who make people do bad things, like the voodoo you see in the movies. Actually, the movies pale to the reality of these people and their spirits and what they do. The Vodouisants call them bakor. We are familiar with the power of these people, which is why many believe the story of the curse.”
“Where do they get their power from?”
“The institution of the bakor came from Africa with the ancestors. The evil spirits move from one generation to the next. How do they get their power? They are known to kill people, especially children. They then control the immense power of these souls by manipulating portions of their bodies for their own purposes.”
“Are you saying that they can cause the electronic fog and manufacture an actual black hole? That is attacking the very foundations of the universe! How and why would they do that?”
“We are talking about things so evil that they oppose the universe itself.”
“Incredible. How do you break this bakor power?”
“The priests of Vodun, called houngans and manbos have rituals to oppose the power of the bakor. Also, there are people in the Catholic Church who practice exorcism. By working together, and by apologizing to the souls of the slaves who worked with the bakor we broke the power of the curse. That is why these incidents have been all but gone for quite a number of years.”
“You said ‘we’ now for the second time. Don’t tell me you are part of this. You are getting just a little weird.”
“I was taught by somebody very special. My grandmother was the most beautiful woman of her generation in the Caribbean. She was a mixture of Spanish, French and African. So she was creole. She was also a manbo, a priestess, just like the one you saw on St Martin. When I was small, I learnt a lot from her. I was her assistant, a houngan.”
“And I thought you were all English.”
“Like most people on the islands, I am a mix. My tan does not go away. Bermudans don’t like to think of themselves as part of the Caribbean but it is not exactly true. Over the centuries there has been a lot of mixing. And in case you’ve wondered, I am a good Catholic. I have not had any contact with Vodun since my grandmother died and that was many years ago.”
“So you are not a priestess?”
“No.”
“Pity.” Grant jumped up, grabbed a spinnaker pole and ran around the boat, stabbing the water with it.
“Get away!” he shouted.
“What are you doing?” Madeleine asked after his second round of the boat.
“I just put two and two together. Maybe these slaves are pulling us down.”
“I’ve never heard of that method before and it does not seem to work because the mist is still there.”
“Then what do we do?” asked Grant. He brandished the pole and poked into the mist with it. “Don’t you remember a ritual or something?”
“I think we need so start with you,” said Madeleine. “The manbo said that you have brought the curse back to the Triangle.”
“That’s what she said but what does it mean? I thought we had covered that angle during the storm.”
“Since then things have been milling around in my subconscious. I have put all these things out of my head for so long, but now I am beginning to think in that way again. How old did you say these two farmers were?”
“A hundred and ten and a hundred and five.”
“That is extraordinary. Also, you have a very special gift, isn’t that so?”
“I don’t call it a gift. I’m just lucky.”
“You have not always been lucky. Didn’t you say the old lady introduced you to the idea of the stock market?”
“She did, yes.”
“Were you lucky before then? Winning at the casinos all the time?”
“Not that I know of. What are you steering at?”
“Has it ever occurred to you that we have a coincidence here of some very extraordinary lucky people? The old people and yourself?”
“Not really.”
“Has she ever asked you for anything in return for you being so lucky and for the farm they gave you.”
The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure Page 26