Gorgo

by Carson Bingham

  We climbed down into the Triton’s launch and Joe took the wheel. He guided it carefully, and as we drew closer to the shore, I could see the terrific damage that the storm and tidal waves had done. Broken pieces of masts floated in the water. Dead fish and waste swirled about us. I could see bits of sail and rope half-submerged.

  The shore hadn’t escaped damage either. Shutters hung lopsided on the houses of the village; and windows were broken, glass was scattered about. Roofs had been smashed in by flying debris. Pools of water had washed up onto the shore and now stood reflecting the dull, misty gray sky.

  As we came in, I could make out the townspeople poking in the rubble, trying to clear away the worst of the wreckage. Men with lined faces lifted their heads and stared at us with dull eyes. Women, their hair awry, their faces blank with shock and sorrow waited us with mute curiosity. Only the children seemed to be enjoying themselves, running around and throwing household objects about with carefree abandon.

  “They got a dock, anyway,” Joe said. “And water.”

  I looked over at the dock and water tank. The dock hadn’t come through the tidal wave unscathed. It was broken in the middle, some of the planks torn up and hurled into the sea.

  “Pretty hard hit, looks like,” I said. My eye caught sight of something in the water just out of reach of the launch. “Joe!”

  He turned. An ugly reddish brown stain was drifting in from the sea, moving along lazily with the incoming tide. Dead fish floated in the midst of the red smear. They looked like cod, but they weren’t like any cod I had ever seen before.

  They were startlingly grotesque abominations. One of them had burst wide open, like an overripe watermelon. It was almost as if it had exploded from the enormous pressure of great sub-oceanic depths. Then I saw one that made me want to retch.

  I pointed. Joe looked, and blinked.

  It was a fish with a huge, malformed disproportionately massive head and long, rapier-like teeth, it had four rudimentary legs. It looked exactly like some creature from another planet.

  I leaned over and hauled the monstrosity in with a boat hook. I held it in my hand, trying to keep my stomach from turning over. Something about it filled me with the dread of the unknown—along with the natural nausea anyone feels for a dead and stinking thing.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before. How about you?”

  “Good Lord, no,” Joe said, shuddering.

  I tossed the fish back. I looked around at the red stain, and the debris drifted by.

  “It was that volcanic explosion.” I said. “It tore up the bottom of the ocean and released these deep-sea fish. No wonder they exploded. They’re built for heavy deep-down pressure.”

  Joe guided the launch to the dock and tied up. We climbed out and hopped onto it. We passed a couple of men already at work on the planking. One of them glanced surreptitiously at us.

  “I’m no linguist, but I do know a couple of words.” I tried to scramble a translation. “Máistir poirt,” I said.

  They merely stared at me and shrugged. Then one of them pointed vaguely toward the cliff past the village, muttered “McCartin.” I looked in the direction he had pointed.

  “Come on,” I said. “One thing I know, Joe. It wasn’t the word for ‘welcome.’ ”

  The old man had gestured to a rocky promontory which housed a lighthouse, a radio tower, and a white cottage. A winding, switchback path led up to it from the beach.

  We trudged up the trail cut in the rock, gazing from time to time at the panorama of the harbor that spread out before us. We could see the broken ships, the ripped up moorings, the floating debris and jetsam.

  Finally we reached the cottage and knocked on the door. After a moment, it opened and we stood looking down at a freckled-faced youth about twelve years old, with green eyes and weedy carrot-colored hair.

  “Máistir poirt,” I said again in my best Gaelic, waiting expectantly.

  The boy nodded, his eyes brightening perceptibly.

  “ ’Tis the right place you’ve come to, then.” To our relief, he spoke English—with a slight brogue. He pulled the door open wider, and stood aside for us to enter.

  I looked at Joe and he winked at me. We walked in.

  And got the surprise of our lives. We were in a big room with wide windows and plenty of light. But it wasn’t an ordinary living room. It was a laboratory of some sort. I saw a microscope on a table, weighing scales, and some tools that looked like assaying equipment.

  “The harbor master lives here?” Joe asked in astonishment.

  “No, no!” the boy laughed. “My father. He’s a government man.”

  I didn’t get that. “Who is he? What’s he do?”

  “He’s an archeologist,” the boy said, pronouncing the word carefully as if he had been taught it with some pains.

  “What’s his name?”

  “McCartin,” the boy said promptly. “Kevin McCartin. I’m Sean.”

  We shook hands solemnly.

  “What do you do around here to help your father, Sean? Work with these gadgets?” I pointed to the scientific equipment.

  “Mostly I clean the things he finds.” Sean grinned widely, showing his big, strong front teeth. “You want to see them?”

  “You bet we would.”

  We followed the red-headed boy into another room that was joined to this by a door. “It’s the storeroom,” Sean said with some pride.

  The place looked like a junk shop. But what junk! I traded glances with Joe, then began checking off the items. These were artifacts, ancient antiques probably worth thousands of dollars to collectors. I recognized some of them—relics of ancient Ireland. Swords, battle axes, shields, helmets. There was even the prow of a ship. And some Viking things, too. Viking and Irish, and all of them showing the obvious effects of long exposure under water.

  “Sam,” Joe said softly.

  I turned. He was pointing to a tall steel safe against the wall. He lifted his eyebrow in mute question.

  “All this has been under the sea for, oh, a thousand years, they say,” Sean observed proudly.

  I touched the gargoyle prow of a ship. “Viking?”

  “No Irish,” the boy said excitedly. “But there was a sea-battle long ago, right off the bay here, with the Vikings. And we Irish drove them out and sank their ships! Fifteen years ago it was my father came here from Ireland to study the things brought up from sunken ships. I was born here.”

  I took a closer look at the ship’s carved prow, and the gargoyle there sent shivers up and down my backbone. It was the personification of some ancient sea monster, with fierce eyes, a small mouth and lashing tongue, and with a frightening, supernatural look about them.

  “Irish whisky carved this baby, I’d say.”

  Sean shrugged. “That’s one of the ships the Irish lost,” he admitted. Then he pointed to the gargoyle’s face. “And that’s Ogra! He helped us. Oh, ’twas grand work Ogra did that day!”

  I grinned. “Sounds like St. Patrick and the snakes.”

  The boy looked around at me and started to laugh. But then he caught sight of something in back of me, and his face froze.

  I turned. Hulking behind me, slouched over like a giant of some kind, stood a huge man with a flaming red beard, red hair, and eyes as blue as bottle glass. He was glaring at us, his hands clenched into fists the size of cantaloupes, his shoulder muscles bulging through his shirt.

  “What’re you doing in here?”

  I started to tell him, but he didn’t let me. He turned on the boy. “Get out!” he snapped.

  Sean gave him a quick look, and then slipped out past him, glancing back cautiously.

  Joe stepped forward. “I’m Joe Ryan. This is Sam Slade, my partner.”

  The big red-bearded man grunted. “I’m McCartin. Salvage vessel, aren’t you?”

  Joe nodded.

  “I thought so,” McCartin rasped. “You have a permit to be in these waters?”

  Joe frowned, bluffing it o
ut. “Permit? From who?”

  McCartin’s blue eyes narrowed. “From Dublin.” He turned and gestured toward the relics on the walls. “My boy told you about it, didn’t he?”

  “Said something about sunken ships.”

  McCartin’s eyes cleared. He took a breath. “I don’t make the rules, Ryan. This stuff has no real value except to a scientist.” McCartin grinned, but he wasn’t really the type who could pull it off. “Ever since these ships have been found, nobody else’s allowed at Nara Island for more than twenty-four hours without a permit.”

  Joe grunted. His yellow eyes began to smolder. “Look, friend,” he said, “I’m not seaworthy, and I won’t be for three or four days. I got driven on this island. I didn’t come here on any pleasure cruise!”

  McCartin’s face was a blank. “I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules. But that’s the way it is.”

  I could see by the way Joe’s body was hunching up that he was about to unwind and blow his cork. I stepped halfway in front of him, smiling amiably, and nodding acquiescence.

  “That’s fine, Mr. McCartin We’re afloat now. How about fresh water? That’s what we need.”

  McCartin looked at Joe, then at me. He considered a moment. Behind me I could tell that Joe was subsiding. He was breathing more easily now and I knew his yellow eyes were not quite so poisonous.

  “Okay,” McCartin said. “You can come in to dock for that.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  We started out of the storeroom. “No hard feelings,” McCartin called to us.

  I saw Joe’s face. He turned, his eyes hooded. “No,” he said. “No hard feelings.” He grinned. Not even a word could do it better.

  We went down the slope in front of the cottage, and were turning into the cliff pathway when suddenly, in front of us, stood Sean McCartin with a funny smile on his freckled face.

  “Sean,” I said. “What do you want?”

  The boy’s glance went over my shoulder up towards the cottage. From where we stood the cottage was cut off from view by a large rock outcrop.

  “I want you to meet someone,” Sean said, and called out behind him some words in Gaelic. It sounded like, “Anois agus ni riamh, Moira” Now or never Moira!

  Then my jaw sagged. I could not speak. For standing right behind Sean, materializing there almost like a ghost, was the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. She was about twenty, fully mature, with brilliant, flaming red hair. Her eyes were a dazzling sea-green. She was beautiful in a wild, unsophisticated way. She wore no makeup. She had on a man’s shirt, without a bra, and it fitted tightly to her full, upthrust bust. Her hips flared out at her waist, where dungarees clung tightly to her thighs.

  She was an ungodly beautiful girl, in a strange, eerie way.

  “ ’Tis water you need?” she asked me in a singsong monotone, almost the tone someone uses who speaks English only by rote.

  Joe moved forward, immediately letting his yellow cat’s eyes run up and down her body. “ ’Tis that!” he said.

  The girl’s eyes turned to him watchfully. Oddly enough, I could see a sudden interest aroused in her. A slight flush suffused her throat and cheeks under his steady scrutiny.

  “We will pay for it,” Joe said. “Won’t we, Sam?”

  I shrugged.

  Joe’s eyes were predatory and eager. “Can you lead us to the water?”

  “ ’Tis in a well. I shall fetch it to you.”

  “No!” Sean cried out fearfully. “If he ever finds out I’ve brought you to see these strangers, he’ll kill me.”

  There was no doubt about who Sean meant by “he.”

  I reached out and grabbed Joe’s arm. “Come on, Joe. Time’s awasting. We’ll be getting back to the ship ma’am,” I continued, turning to Moira and nodding politely. “Send Sean down with some fresh water if you like. We’ll pay him.”

  Moira nodded. Her eyes were level and calm. There was the cool of the forest and the depth of the sea in them. And they were looking straight into mine. I could feel something stir inside me down deep in my gut. Something that had been dead a long time. Something that I thought had been killed by just such a pair of eyes, a long time ago.

  The girl vanished the same way she had come, around the rock outcrop and into the cliffside underbrush. Sean plodded back up toward the cottage across the slope.

  We hurried down to the beach. Joe let out a low whistle, and chuckled! “What a broad!” he sighed. “No wonder her old man keeps her under glass. She’s set the whole island—or any other island—on its ear! What a build!”

  “She seems to be the wholesome type,” I said quietly. “Not the kind you go for at all.”

  Joe leered at me, his yellow eyes slitted and glowing. “Wholesome! I saw that look you gave her, Sam. Don’t be getting ideas about her! I don’t want to have to wetnurse you through another assault rap!”

  “You take care of your fleas,” I snapped, “and I’ll take care of mine.”

  Joe chuckled. “That bitch Anita you got hung up by in the States wasn’t half the looker this tomato is, Sam. You got to admit that.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was boiling. I thought I’d left all that behind me, wrapped up in a shopping bag in Port Arthur, Texas. But hell, you never leave a dame like Anita behind. She’s always with you, hitching a ride in your belly somewhere, watching everything over your shoulder. Joe was right. No sense getting wound up in any dame the way I had, and sweat out another assault rap trying to clobber the guy she’d two-timed me with. Next time, if things went the way they had before, I’d be up on a murder charge.

  And no way out.

  The hell with it. I was through with women—for good.

  We headed for the dock. “I hope that well water’s as good as it sounds,” Joe remarked.

  I nodded. I was thinking about something else, something that puzzled me. “You believe McCartin about that permit Joe?”

  Joe snorted. “Hell no!”

  We were just about to board the launch when four island rowing boats loomed up out of the mist beside the dock. Each was manned by four oarsmen, and carried a skin diver complete with equipment including a pouch on the belt. The oarsmen were resting on their paddles now, studying the same strange red stain in the water we’d seen on our way in.

  “They got the same feeling about that blood we did,” Joe said.

  I nodded.

  “I wonder where they’re diving,” Joe muttered. “I think we’d swing a little more weight around here if we found out.” He looked at me significantly.

  We moved to the launch and climbed in. The four diving boats rowed on out past us through the mist, heading for the open sea.

  We did our reconnoitering that afternoon, in the launch, with Jack Finn at the wheel. And we found the four diving boats in a deep, secluded inlet not far from the harbor, about a quarter of the distance around the small island.

  Jack Finn throttled down the launch at a signal from Joe, and we approached the divers in a wide cautious circle. The sullen boatmen eyed us malevolently.

  Joe grinned and waved a hand casually, playing the Personality Kid. “Having any luck?”

  The men in the boat didn’t answer.

  “You try them, Boats,” Joe told the big Irishman. “In Gaelic.”

  Jack Finn snorted. “They speak English as good as we do. They just pretend they don’t.” But he went ahead anyway.

  “Dia dhuit!” And he rattled off some fast Gaelic I couldn’t follow. The boatmen snarled gutturals back at him. Jack Finn grimaced. “They got no time to be talking to strangers. McCartin does the talking on the island.”

  Joe shook his head. I was watching the divers, and I could see that something had suddenly agitated them. I pointed to them and asked Finn to translate their gabble.

  The Bos’n listened, and I could see his stolid face animated with sudden interest. He shifted his cigarette slightly and spoke. “One of the divers didn’t come up. They’re saying he’s gone.”

  I looke
d at the big Irisher, startled. There was something funny about his odd use of the word. “Gone?”

  He cocked his head toward the group of boats.

  “They’ve got to go down and find him. But they’re scared of something.”

  “Scared?” I looked at Joe. His eyes widened. There was a sudden intuitive communication between us. The blood stains. The fish that had burst. The strange abomination with the four rudimentary legs.

  We watched the dive. Two men jumped. The others watched tensely. Instantly the first diver came back up. He shook his head. The second did not reappear. After a moment there were more excited mutterings from the boatmen.

  Then, abruptly, the second diver popped to the surface, only a few feet from our launch, yelling incoherently, tearing off his diving mask. He took two frantic strokes to reach our launch. The man was beside himself with fear, his eyes wide and beaming with horror.

  I reached out at the same time Joe did, and we hauled him into the boat, his eyes turned up in his head, and he went limp on the bottom of the launch.

  I leaned over him, twisting him so he was in position for artificial respiration.

  “He’s not hurt,” I said.

  Joe went to work on the man. I could hear his breathing, odd, shallow and rapid. His body twitched convulsively. As he lay there, with Joe working at him something dropped out of the pouch at his belt. Joe bent over, reaching down in the bottom of the launch.

  “Sam!”

  I leaned down, looking in Joe’s hand, held low so none of the boatmen could see it. My eyes widened. He was holding three gold coins of ancient minting. “That’s what’s bugging McCartin!” Joe hissed. “He’s been looting this wreak. That’s what he’s keeping in his safe!”

  I stared at Joe.

  “ ‘No value except to a scientist’,” Joe quoted drily. “Huh! We’re going to make us some loot here before we leave, Sam! Real loot!”

  I looked at him sharply, but before I could get a word out, the diver in the bottom of the boat gave a terrible twitch, gurgled out something that sounded like “arrachtach,” and shuddered from head to toe. I reached out to touch him, but I knew the man was already gone.