The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction Megapack 01

by George Allan England

  “Who’s to find out anythin’, underwater? And besides, the way times is— And then, too, our Bill with the T.B.”

  Suddenly he straightened up. His brain cleared. The whirling stopped.

  “Nix!” he exclaimed.

  “Nix what?” asked the driver.

  “Nix on that stunt. I couldn’t do it. Thanks, a heck of a lot, but nothin’ doin’.”

  “The hell you say! Why not?”

  “Well—” And Tim seemed studying his fingernails. “It ain’t the way us divers does business, that’s all. What we’re hired to risk our lives to do, we allus does the best we can. Ourn ain’t a gyp game, for any diver as is a diver. So thanks, mister, but forget it!”

  “Aw, hell, don’t be a simp!”

  “Never mind about that simp part of it!” And Tim’s jaw grew taut. “I said ‘No,’ didn’t I? Well, that means no! N-i-x, no! So—great weather we’re havin’, ain’t it? Reckon it’ll rain, to-morrer?”

  Many cars stood parked near the steamboat landing at Crystal Lake. Reporters and photographers had gathered. On the wharf a knot of curiosity-seekers thrilled with pleasurable anticipation as the truck backed up and as two husky men and a very grumpy-looking driver unloaded two huge boxes. The audience tautened, as the stage began to be set for a stirring real-life drama.

  Now, with a businesslike air, a gray and thin little wisp of a man came forward.

  “You’re Spurling, the diver, of course?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “I’m Doctor Olivier. Coroner, as well as physician to the family of the victim. Glad you’re here, Spurling. This is a terrible thing to happen.”

  “Sure, I know. I heard all about it, on the train and comin’ out from the depot. Young feller named Gordon Eccles, just ’bout sixteen years old.”

  “Yes, that’s right. He was diving from that float out there.” The doctor pointed a lean finger at a raft with a springboard, some two hundred yards from shore. “I hardly see how it could have happened. He was a first-rate swimmer. Must have had a cramp.”

  “Sure, he must.” And Spurling nodded his tousled head. “Happened yest’day p.m.?”

  “Yes, about five o’clock. He never came up, at all. And—”

  “Been any draggin’ for him?” asked Spurling, while morbid folk crowded around.

  “Dragging? Yes. Work has been carried on for hours, but no results. And the boy’s parents—especially his mother—nearly insane. Their only child. What does all their money mean to them, now?”

  “Not much, I reckon.”

  “And what,” the doctor asked, “is your charge for this kind of work?”

  “Me and my helper,” replied Spurling, his blue eyes narrowing appraisingly, “two hundred a day.”

  “Two— Well, I suppose that’s quite all right. How long is the work likely to require?”

  “That depends. What’s the depth, out there?”

  “Sixty feet or so. Maybe more.”

  “Any currents?”

  “So I understand. The lake is fed by springs. The outlet is a mile below here.” Doctor Olivier pointed. “But you can find the body, surely?”

  “With any kind o’ luck, and if I have what I need to work with.”

  “What else do you need besides what you’ve brought?” the doctor queried, while the spectators absorbed it all with keenest interest. Among them stood the truckman, his face drawn into lines of disappointment and harsh malice.

  “What else do I need? Well, I got to have plenty o’ rope, and a sixteen-foot ladder weighted at one end, and somethin’ to dive off of and hold my equipment—somethin’ mighty solid.”

  “That’s all arranged. We’ve had a float built.” The doctor pointed where a massive float lay moored at the end of the wharf. “There’s a motorboat lashed to it, too. Take you anywhere you want to go, with your equipment and helper.”

  “Fine!”

  Spurling walked to the wharf end, stood and peered down, inspecting the float. He noted the quality of its huge beams. No cost had been spared.

  “Hell!” thought he. “Maybe I’d oughta of asked two hundred and fifty!”

  A long gray car swung to a stop at the steamer landing. Out of this car, as a chauffeur opened the door, a man came stumbling. This man was fifty-odd, and he looked seventy. His legs shook. Sunken, dead-seeming eyes blinked in the July sun, out of a lined and waxen face.

  “Him?” grunted the diver, with a jerk of the head.

  The doctor nodded.

  The drowned boy’s father advanced uncertainly. Eager cameras clicked. Pencils danced across notebooks. Not every day could Harrison T. Eccles, financial colossus, be caught in agony for the world’s delectation.

  “Are you the diver?” he asked, in a perfectly flat voice that seemed to be the voice of some queer mechanism.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How soon can you get to work? It’s very important.”

  “Right off.”

  “And how long—”

  “Well, as I was just tellin’ the doctor, it all depends. It’s all accordin’ to depths and currents, and the like o’ that.”

  “Of course. But you’ll do your best—your quickest! I’m not appealing to you for my own sake. It’s his mother. She—she’s—”

  “Sure, I know, mister! Reckon I know what a mother thinks of her son. I’d oughta!”

  “You have a son, too?”

  “Yeah. Just one. And he’s—but never mind. I’ll do what I can. Can’t promise nothin’, o’ course. It’s that uncertain, divin’ is. But whatever I can do I will!”

  The millionaire’s thin hand went out. The diver’s massive one enfolded it.

  “Reckon I oughta know what an only son means!” repeated Spurling. “And you can count on me, mister, for all I’m worth!”

  Under the watchful eyes of the crowd now constantly growing, and the bitter, hostile gaze of the truckman, Spurling and McTaggart unloaded their equipment from the wharf onto the waiting raft. Doctor Olivier meantime sent for a rope and a ladder, weighted as the diver had specified.

  Presently Spurling, McTaggart, and the doctor got aboard the raft. With them they took three reliable workmen to help with the air pump and to do other work. The pump and diving gear, when laboriously lowered by ropes to the raft, fascinated the spectators now lining the string-piece. The atmosphere fairly vibrated with electric tensions of excitement. Never had Crystal Lake known so thrilling a day as this.

  Presently the motorboat towed the float out to the raft whence young Eccles had taken his fatal plunge. Spurling had the float anchored there with long ropes lashed to heavy grate bars.

  The drowned boy’s father drove away. Silent and hollow-eyed, he went back to his stricken wife. It lay not in human nature for him to stay there on that wharf, waiting for those deep and cold waters to give up the dead.

  But it lay very much in human nature for townsfolk and gentlemen of the press to snatch all the boats available, and hover around the scene. A couple of newsreel scouts set up a movie camera in a boat and began grinding out footage.

  “Now then,” Spurling directed McTaggart, “let’s get busy and unpack. We got to test the pump. Sixty, seventy foot; that’s quite a dive!”

  “Think you’ll locate the body close by here?” queried the doctor.

  “Search me! Might be ’most anywhere, by now. Might even o’ drifted out the lake, down the outlet—no tellin’. We got to keep tryin’, movin’ round till we locate it.”

  “When is it likely to rise?” cut in a reporter, from a boat that had edged near.

  “Can’t say,” the diver answered. “In this here cold water tain’t likely to rise, at all. And, by the way, you get out o’ there! Think I want to get all balled up with a bunch o’ butters-in? Scram!”

  He turned to help McTaggart bolt the heavy iron flywheels and handles to the pump shaft, to test the compression on the air gauges, then to unpack the diving suit.

  The workmen were meantime lashing the
weighted ladder to the edge of the float. A quarter of it rose in air; the rest hung down into the pale-green waters, so cold, so deadly.

  *****

  Unpacked, the diving suit sprawled on the float, with oddly turned-in feet, with loose arms tipped by rubber wrists. The suit looked like a fantastic burlesque of a body, a bizarre mockery of humanity.

  Then, Spurling laid out the massive metal breastplate and the goggly-eyed helmet, its windows crisscrossed by thick bars. His brain seemed humming, as he worked. Five grand! Five thousand smackers! And Bill with the T.B.! And far below, a dead boy’s body—the body of an only son—and somewhere, a mother going mad and dying.

  “Hell, I got to buck up!”

  Spurling bucked up. He forced himself to unroll and to examine the black rubber hose whereon his very life was to depend. Painstakingly he inspected the lifeline, and connected hose to pump, making sure all joints were tight and absolutely perfect.

  His mind seemed blurred and queerly confused, but his hands were deft as he oiled the helmet valves. Sitting down on the float he took off his worn shoes, tucked his trousers into his socks, soaped his hands, then struggled into the heavy suit.

  Around Tim’s neck McTaggart now laced the apron. Tim Spurling had already lost much of his human semblance, had assumed the guise of some extraordinary monster. He lubricated his soaped hands with water, then drew on the rubber bands that were to keep his arms dry.

  “All right, the breastplate!” he directed, while reporting went on apace, and townsfolk thrilled. Even Doctor Olivier forgot to feel professional sympathy for the bereaved millionaire and his wife, in the interest of watching this singular procedure of a diver preparing for his work.

  Rare sensation, this; a diver descending into fashionable Crystal Lake, for the body of a magnate’s only son!

  “Gimme a drag, Mac,” ordered Spurling. “I gotta have a drag before I go down!”

  Mac lighted a cigarette for him. Puffing deep lungfuls of smoke, Spurling stood up and let his helper fit the breastplate studs into the rubber collar of the dress. McTaggart made the plate fast. Faint tinks of metal sounded, blending with a quiet lap-lap-lap of water round the float. At a little distance, conversation buzzed, speculation passed from boat to boat. Now or then more cars arrived at the wharf. More, ever more curiosity-seekers gathered there.

  Bright sun, cheerful sky, and dazzling clouds all made it gay, all of them mocked the mystery of human grief.

  “Now, them shoes!” Spurling commanded.

  His helper drew on the heavy rubber shoes, buckled them over the clumsy feet of the diving suit.

  “Weights, Mac.”

  “Goin’ to use the foot weights, too?”

  “Nope. I’ll chance it without ’em. Can get round better with just the belt.”

  *****

  McTAGGART FITTED ON the leather belt, sagging with more than eighty pounds of leaden pigs. He fastened the buckles that, in case of accident, Spurling could unsnap in a jiffy for quick ascent. Then he tied the lifeline under his chief’s arms and secured it to the breastplate stud. After screwing the air hose firmly to the plate, he led it under Spurling’s left arm and fastened it in front.

  “Ready for the helmet, now?”

  “Yep!” And Spurling, with a final eruption of smoke, threw the cigarette away. “Get ready to start the poison, there. Take it easy, boys, but keep goin’. Start twistin’, now!”

  As the huge round helmet closed over his head, and with a quarter-turn was screwed home and fastened, he became wholly unreal. His eyes peered dimly from those cross-barred windows, as though from another world.

  Two men at the handles of the ponderous wheels, began slowly and steadily turning. Mac tapped his “O.K.” on the helmet. Spurling dragged himself to the ladder. Clumsily he wallowed down it.

  Now his suit began puffing with air. As the water took him, he moved more easily. Down, down he sagged; then with a crab-like, sidewise motion, slid off the ladder. McTaggart, at the edge of the float, held the lifeline and air hose in careful, experienced hands.

  As Spurling sank, the line still partly supported him. Cameras did their best. Pencils leaped. Boats crowded in, despite Mac’s snarled warnings to stand clear. With a swirling twist, Spurling wavered down into the lake. His vast eyes of glass and metal blurred away into the cold green deeps. They faded, vanished. A line of bubbles rose and broke, flinging fine spray into the summer air.

  Water eddied round the float. Steadily the line and hose, paid out by the watchful Mac, ran away.

  Already far below, the diver was sinking down and down, into regions of unreality and dream.

  *****

  SPURLING FELT not the slightest uneasiness, so far as just the diving itself was concerned. Hundreds of times he had been down, often in swift rivers or in the sea itself, far deeper than this. Many a time he had risked his life exploring perilous wrecks where rotten timbers might have fallen and jammed, where octopuses and sharks might have lurked. This job, now, in a sheltered lake was different.

  “Cinch!” thought he. “If it wasn’t for bein’ a stiff that I’m after, it’d be a cinch!”

  How he hated diving and groping for stiffs!

  Oh, yes, he’d recovered not a few, in his time, from wrecks. But they made bad salvage. They were liable to do such singular and gruesome things. Under the compelling urge of water, they sometimes moved so convincingly, in ghastly imitation of life.

  Once, he remembered, he had been fairly terrified away from a job by a body that had refused to be salvaged; a body that, three separate times, had jerked itself free from his grasp. Spurling had had to come up, take off his suit, and gulp nearly a pint of raw liquor before he’d been able to go down again and discover that the body—an old sea captain—had been caught in a loose bight of rope.

  And Spurling had never forgotten that nerve-tingling experience. It had made him corpse shy. But as for the mere diving, itself—why, nothing to it!

  “It’s only the damn stiff I don’t like,” thought he, as he slid down, ever down into the darkening waters. “That’s all, just the stiff. How I hate to handle ’em! But two hundred smackers a day—”

  Looking out through the thick glass, he perceived a vague greenish light, still faintly shot through by slanting sun rays. A certain uneasiness had begun to develop in the hinges of his jaw. He opened his mouth, shut it, to loosen the pressure on his eardrums; and constantly he swallowed.

  “Oughta have a wad o’ gum to chaw,” he reflected. That always helped. Too bad he’d forgotten the gum. But never mind; he’d get by without it. Only the lack of it somehow disconcerted him.

  His ears commenced to feel as if he had a cold. But that was nothing. Many a time, diving, he’d suffered real pain, especially on top of his head. When that grew too severe it meant coming up. But as yet, nothing bothered Tim Spurling; nothing but his grim errand.

  All sensations of weight were vanishing now; strangely fading away. Gravitation claimed hardly more than thirty pounds, from his hundred and eighty of bone and muscle, from his ponderous gear, lead weights and all. Never did a human being move, atop the earth, as lightly as now Spurling when he set foot on the hard, rock-tossed floor of Crystal Lake.

  “Gee! Well, I’m down, anyhow!” he said to himself, as he gave Mac the “on bottom” and the “O.K.” signal. Dimly an unreal, isolated, mysterious world surrounded him. Everything had grown eerie and unnatural.

  A sense of utter isolation, of supreme unreality possessed the diver. He was only about seventy feet away from other men, but he might have been a million miles. Far from imaginative though he was, still he sensed this extraordinary unreality which always took place in every dive.

  Startled fishes flicked away; or, growing bolder, circled, backed, and nosed waveringly about him. One bumped the glass of his helmet. It sounded like a small volcanic explosion. Regularly, tunk-tunk-tunk, something pulsated in his crackling ears. That slight noise of the pump was comforting. Yes, after all there must be ano
ther world; a world of reality, where men dwelt. A world in which McTaggart was keenly watching; in which the diver’s wife was waiting; in which Bill, their son—

  Thoughts of the boy stabbed Spurling. For a time he had forgotten the boy, the doctor, the verdict of T.B. Now all this surged back sickeningly. Spurling remembered why he was here, what he had come for.

  “Hell of a job!” he growled, inside his goggle-eyed helmet. “But I gotta do it. We need the money, and I gotta go through!”

  He stood on the bottom of the lake, peering about him in that unreal and ghostly dimness. Off at his right he could just make out the grate bars that anchored his diving float, and beyond them two immense cubes of concrete with ring bolts, that held the swimming raft. Vague ropes led upward. Muted though all illumination now was, his vision was growing used to it. He perceived this watery world in hues of green gloom. Sinuous plants waved mysteriously beckoning arms. Off at one side lay a jet-black patch—the shadow of his diving float, far above.

  “Where the devil an’ all, now, is that stiff?”

  Vainly he looked. Nothing at all in guise of a drowned body was visible. He felt his air pressure rising a bit too high. To lower it, he slightly cracked his petcock valve. Crowding upward, bubbles chased one another toward the surface.

  The job he had to do, Spurling realized, might be long. Had currents drifted the body, the raft would have to be moved. No telling how much time it might take.

  “But it’s a hundred and eighty-five bucks a day, clear, for me,” he thought. “And we gotta have at least five hundred, to save Bill. Three days’ll give us the five, and a little over. I only wisht it would take three days!”

  Then, almost before this desire had registered, he saw the object of his search.

  Yes, there it lay, hardly twenty feet from one of the big concrete cubes. Dim though the down-filtering light was, none the less that light revealed the son of Eccles, the millionaire, sunk in a hollow amid plant-grown boulders.

  The boy lay on his right side, clad in a blue bathing suit. The face was averted; one arm outstretched as if in final, agonized protest against death.

  Spurling’s first reaction was an exultant: “Found him, by gosh!”