The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

by James P. Blaylock

  The fabled spirit of the island was very much on my mind as I lay in my bunk that night. Through the cabin window I could see the volcano spewing embers, the slopes alive once again, the bright orange leaping and jumping, the stream of molten lava having increased to something like a river.

  DAWN SAW US anchored along the steep eastern shore, with the dark mouth of the sea cave clearly visible in the morning twilight, just as James Douglas had described it. The ocean was serene, or something like it, with only a slight surge lapping against the reef that sheltered the small bay. I had the uneasy feeling that something was pending, however. The breeze blew out of the northeast, rippling the surface of the ocean. The volcano rumbled ominously and belched smoke and ash along with showers of glowing cinders and stone. I’ve never been to war, thank Heaven, but it seemed to me that we were in the last moments of preternatural calm before a great battle.

  Gilbert and Tubby joined me at the railing now, Tubby carrying a basket of sandwiches and a metal flask of strong, hot coffee, which went down gratefully with the makeshift breakfast, the remainder of which I was under orders to give to St. Ives, already busy within the diving bell. Tubby wore his ridiculous Bollinger hat with the peacock feathers. Gilbert was in a rare state, his face lit by the rose tinted sunlight, giving the appearance of a bemused devil. He chased a mouthful of bread and meat down his gullet with a swig of coffee and said to me, “It’s a fitting morning for the work we do, Jack, the ocean easy on the one hand, and the island uneasy on the other. It’s the sort of balance that’s much sought after in the Orient, where the lowest scullery boy is a philosopher. I envy you, Jacky, surely I do, sailing into the midst of glory aboard the scow while I languish aboard ship. That sort of glory is very nearly gone out of the world.”

  His words were punctuated by a frightful explosion from the volcano, which blew out a patch of rock the size of a rugby pitch, enormous boulders flying far out into the ocean, sending up plumes of water like a pod of whales. A wide river of lava poured out of the breech in the mountainside and flowed downward toward the sea. “Let’s pray that the mountain doesn’t throw stones in our direction,” I said with an uneasy laugh, my mind damning all glory to hell.

  “These volcanoes are perpetually up to such capers,” Gilbert said. “I’ve studied the creatures. They disgorge a bit of their innards to relieve the pressure, you see, rather like a good vomit after a heavy meal. She’ll rest easier now. You can depend upon it, Jack.” He smiled unconvincingly and looked at his chronometer. “We should be about our business, however. I suspect that we haven’t seen the last of our friend Billy Stoddard. It would have been best if we had simply rammed the sloop when we met him off the Lizard, but there had been too much slaughter, and it wasn’t in my heart to do it—a weakness, perhaps. But there’ll be no such weakness if he makes a second attempt. No, sir. In three hours time I intend to leave this corner of the ocean. I mean to stop in Kingston tomorrow evening in order to look up a woman I knew in my youth, a Miss Bracken, very comely, or once was. I don’t speak biblically, of course, when I say that I knew her, although if my luck is in perhaps that’ll change, eh?”

  He mopped his brow with a kerchief, for the morning was already warm. “Once you lads are moored beneath the island, Jack, Phibbs will extinguish all lamps, and you’ll wait for the sun in the darkness, just as in Douglas’s account. There’s less chance of…attracting unwarranted attention that way.” He winked, turned about, and descended via a portable companionway to the deck of the scow, which was crowded. Tubby and I followed him, the phrase unwarranted attention, circulating in my mind. I was suddenly anxious to be underway, if only to get the thing done. Waiting has never agreed with me.

  Phibbs stood ready to cast off. Gilbert shouted something to him, took a look around, nodded with apparent satisfaction, and went back up the companionway to the deck of the steamer. Hasbro, wearing duck trousers rolled up at the ankles and a straw wide-awake hat, shoveled coal into the furnace, which was pouring smoke. There was a ruckus on the deck of the steamer, where four pike-carrying crewmen warded off imaginary boarders. Captain Deane’s head was just visible above the Nordenfelt gun, as bloody-minded in his way as the pirates had been.

  I saw St. Ives through one of the bell’s windows, the bell itself hanging suspended from a davit on the end of the crane, tethered by chain along which ran an air-hose, which would be our source of both fresh air and pressure, although if all went well we would scarcely need more than a modicum of fresh air; either the ambergris would be there or it would not be. A speaking tube ran along beside the air-hose. From the bottom of the bell descended a large, globe-shaped mechanical claw, which opened now and descended into the sea. Up it came again, closed up and dripping water, and then opening and closing again as St. Ives familiarized himself with the controls of the device. The talons of the claw, if you will, were heavily padded in order to protect our prize. Below the bell, set into the deck of the scow, lay a round sheet of glass through which I could see fish swimming below—no doubt a way for Phibbs to find the ambergris in order to position the bell atop it.

  The lot of us were taking a myriad of things on faith, it seemed to me, but at this juncture there was no more sensible way to take them. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought—many tens of thousands of pounds if you were Gilbert Frobisher. I said a temporary adieu to Tubby and then hauled myself into the bell by way of a short ladder, which I pulled in after me, and sat on the padded leather seat, my feet on the foot rail and the mechanical claw hovering just above our foreheads in the top. Attached to the walls were two long, brass viewing tubes, devices that would allow one to see directly beneath the bell, where, for want of a window, the view would be least clear. It was cool and damp, the atmosphere having a muffling effect on the ears and also on the mechanical noise of the engine. St. Ives and I could hear each other clearly.

  “Do you suppose it’ll be there?” I asked him.

  “I do not,” he said. “It’s wildly implausible that it could have found its way back into the stony depression that had been its home. Once the Indian divers dropped it, it would have been at the mercy of the surge and the tides and very soon swept out into the open ocean. Little do I care for ambergris, Jack, although certainly it’s a curious phenomenon. As for its value, however, purchasing and fitting out the Nancy Dawson in this extravagant manner must have consumed far more than the treasure is worth, even if it still lies where it lay forty years past, which beggars possibility. We’re simply men on a holiday, I’m afraid.”

  Abruptly we were underway. The bell gave a lurch, and I grabbed onto one of the holdfasts at the edge of the window to my right as we swayed on the davit. “I’m of a like mind,” I told St. Ives, “and now that we’re here on this holiday, or better yet, fool’s errand—I don’t speak of Gilbert Frobisher, mind you—I find that I don’t like it a bit. I’m not a superstitious man, but there’s something damned odd about this place, or perhaps simply damned. The volcano doesn’t account for it.”

  “I take your meaning, and of course James Douglas felt the same thing.”

  “He was a mere lad, however,” I said. “I’m supposed to have outgrown such fears.”

  “Nonsense,” St. Ives told me. “Over the past year my own mind has been quite altered from its formerly rational view of things, and I find that I now have a higher regard for much of what we mistakenly call superstition. Do you recall the name of this island?”

  “Santa Lusca,” I said, “not to be confused with Santa Lucia.”

  “The name is in itself interesting. I’ve seen it now and then in accounts of this part of the world, many of those accounts evidently fabulous. Gilbert’s notion of an island spirit has some basis in local legend, although perhaps he’s unaware of it, but is merely giving voice, as you are, to a sensation that he cannot define.”

  The dark, half-circle of the cave was drawing closer, sunlight sparkling on the small bay before it, although the sky was growing hazy with smoke and ash from t
he volcano. The Nancy Dawson lay at anchor some distance behind us now—farther than I would have thought possible in such a brief span of time. “Of what basis do you speak?” I asked.

  “Local tales, apparently of native origin, concerning a large sea creature referred to as a ‘Lusca,’ quite feared by the natives of these islands. There’s an improbably deep trench cutting through this part of the ocean, you know. No less a luminary than Lord Kelvin himself took soundings in the vicinity of Andros Island some fifteen years ago. He played out 2,000 meters of weighted piano wire and failed to find the bottom. I’ve often wondered what might live in the never-ending darkness of those abyssal depths. Megalodon, perhaps, or plesiosaurs, or cephalopods of a size that one sees only in dreams.”

  “You dream of cephalopods?”

  “Regularly, however…”

  Our conversation ended abruptly, for we ourselves were cast into darkness, the sea cave swallowing us. An electric lamp on the bow switched on, illuminating the cavern and irritating the sea birds nesting in the walls, although their protests were mostly lost in the engine noise. Phibbs and Tubby lowered anchors fore and aft in order to stabilize the scow, an easy enough task given the utterly calm water, and then Phibbs extinguished the bow light in order to avoid attracting the attention of…what?

  We settled down in the twilight to wait out the sun. Before two minutes had passed, the island shook bodily, and a shower of rock pinged off the bell just over our heads. I could see the silhouettes of Phibbs, Tubby, and Hasbro hurrying to clear away debris, tossing chunks of rock over the side. It seemed as if the great god Lusca might dwell in the heart of the island rather than in the deeps of the sea.

  To distract myself I searched for and discovered the window in the rock wall of the cavern. It glowed faintly, but with a slowly rising intensity as the sun made its way up the sky. The men on deck were more than mere silhouettes now. We were moving at last: the bell swung out over the side, paused, and then swung back a trifle. We gazed downward at the water, into which we would soon plunge, but I could make out little beneath the surface. After another long moment we jerked into downward motion, descending slowly. Cool, tinny smelling air whooshed into the bell, and very quickly seawater climbed the interior wall as if to drown us, which was more than a little unnerving.

  St. Ives was as placid as a clam, however. “There it stops,” he said, nodding downward, and I saw that it was true—the water had had apparently reached equilibrium and had ceased to rise, at least for the moment.

  Both of us removed the viewing tubes from their mounts and dipped the broad end into the water, the sea bottom springing into clarity through the lens. As we descended I watched the living sea beneath us, the play of sunlight over the shifting landscape, the fading of colors in the depths. Fishes swam around the coral growths and volcanic rock—parrotfish and grouper that I recognized from the books in my cabin. Clouds of bright blue damselfish darted in and out of the corals along with yellow seahorses and black triggerfish. Several immense barracuda—nasty looking characters, pirates to a man—regarded us from a distance. A queue of foot-length squid hovered below the bell, their enormous eyes watching us carefully. They shifted away in a body in order to give us room as we passed, never looking away from us but rotating together to keep us in sight. And then, on the instant, they wheeled around like a flock of starlings and shot away into the distance, as if on an urgent errand.

  We were thirty feet from the sea floor when we saw it: Gilbert Frobisher’s ball of ambergris, perfectly immense.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Treasure Trove

  BELOW US, JUST slightly outside the circumference of the bell, stood several giant sea fans, waving in the slow current, exposing and then hiding the great ivory ball of ambergris, just as James Douglas had described it.

  “Four feet to starboard,” St. Ives said into the speaking tube. We scarcely felt the shift, but found ourselves drifting until we were directly over our prize, at which point St. Ives called, “Stop.” We halted perhaps six feet from the seabed, above the white coral stones and sea fans that surrounded our prize. My eyes, as you can imagine, were on that ball of ambergris. Gilbert hadn’t exaggerated its size or the lustrous purity of its ivory color. It lay within the stones like a small moon that had fallen from the heavens.

  “It’s found its way back to its nest,” I said, noting that the ring of stone around it looked very like a purposefully constructed enclosure.

  “Curious, indeed,” St. Ives said, the implausible having come to pass. “It shares the nest with other foreign objects, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “A broken cutlass,” I said, spotting the encrusted blade and pommel lying next to the ambergris. “And a mantel clock with the face of a moon.” The clock looked as if it might have been plucked out of a captain’s cabin yesterday. Beside the clock lay a small, iron-bound chest, open and half full of sand with what appeared to be a crystal sugar basin partly buried. Unlike the cutlass, the sugar basin had apparently only begun to be encrusted with sea life, although clearly it had sat on the sea bottom longer than the clock. Impossibly, the basin was crammed full of the heads of Punch and Judy dolls, the paint having faded and chipped, but the heads still recognizable to anyone who has seen a puppet show.

  “I believe that I make out the blade of a halberd,” St. Ives said, “no doubt several hundred years old, and mingled with items that might have been added to the collection a month ago.”

  “Just so,” I said. “Collection is the salient term. Very like a child’s treasure, combed from the sea floor. What do you make of it?”

  “I can make nothing of it, Jack. There is no rational explanation.”

  “The irrational then?”

  “Some sentient creature has collected these things and deposited them here for safe-keeping.”

  I couldn’t argue with the idea, although it was profoundly strange and unlikely. To my surprise I discovered that my doubts and fears had quite fled away, replaced by an avid curiosity. My admiration for Gilbert Frobisher had arisen a considerable degree. “Clearly we must take the ambergris,” I said, “but to my mind we should let the rest of the collection lie.”

  “Agreed,” St. Ives said. “I very much wish that we had brought something to leave in exchange. This feels like common thievery.” He manipulated the retractor now, the claw opening and descending toward the ambergris. He worked with immense patience and concentration, not trusting entirely to the India rubber pads, and having no desire to chip so much as a fragment from the ocean-washed orb. The claw closed over it at last, and I let out my breath, which I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. The claw retracted, simple as you please, and rose back into the bell, sucking sand and debris from the sea floor and exposing further treasures that had been hidden by the ambergris, including a number of human skulls, although the lot of it was immediately obscured by the swirling sand and languidly moving sea fans. The entrapped ambergris passed before my eyes, hanging suspended at last within the dome. The venture had gone forward with uncanny smoothness.

  “We’ve got it,” St. Ives said into the tube, with a tone of excitement that was slightly more elevated than one would expect of a man on a holiday. Up we went, the sea bottom receding below us.

  “Here’s to success,” I said, nodding at St. Ives. In that moment a great, long shadow crossed the window, and I instantly regretted my words, which were rash in the extreme. The shadow revealed itself to be the dark bulk of a hammerhead shark, startlingly heavy of body and perhaps nineteen or twenty feet long. It nosed into the ring of stones, shook itself, and moved on. Was it the owner, I wondered, of the strange treasure? And what would it do when it discovered that the collection had been disturbed? I realized then that the air was darkening again, the sun having crossed the window and moved on.

  “We’ve an interested shark, Mr. Phibbs,” St. Ives said into the speaking tube, and almost at once we accelerated in our ascent. The shark angled downward again, swimming away from us, and then t
urned and came lazily back along the sea bottom. The surface of the ocean seemed to me to be appallingly distant, and very quickly it disappeared from view, the cavern having fallen into twilight.

  “Certainly we’re safe within the bell,” I said, at a point when the creature was nearly below us. It gave a sharp jerk, and then rushed upward at an incredible speed, its eyes visible on the tips of the strange, flattened hammer that was its head. I let out a cry, jerked my feet from their perch on the foot rail, and flung them onto the seat, wafering myself against the wall. St. Ives did the same, just as the monster burst from the water, its head and upper body virtually filling the center of the bell, its great jaws snapping, its mouth lined with serrated teeth. Its hammer-like nose banged against the brass claw, knocking the ball of ambergris upward. St. Ives threw up an arm to steady it—grace under pressure, it seemed to me even then—and the shark fell away backward.

  We soon found ourselves dangling in the air again, safe at last, still rising, the sound of the engine filling our ears after the undersea silence. There was a powerful rumble then, masking even the engine noise, and once again the air was full of debris clattering against the aluminum shell in which we sat. We swung inward, and Phibbs set us down jarringly on the deck, where things were moving forward in a terrible hurry. Already the anchors were coming in, and Hasbro once again shoveled coal into the orange mouth of the furnace, working in a determined hurry. Phibbs, who was signaling our success to the ship with a colored flag, apparently meant for us to remain in the bell, where we were comparatively safe and out of the way. The scow set out, its wake roiling over the rocks of the cavern behind us, sea birds fleeing away overhead, and we were out into the open air and daylight, such as it was, for the smoky sky was the color of a bruise now. Rock tumbled down the steep cliffs, flinging up spray when they struck the sea roundabout us.