Death Trance

Twenty-Six

Next day, the wind dropped and the sun came out, and I changed my mind about accompanying Edward and Forrest and Jimmy on their search for the wreck of the David Dark. We left Pickering Wharf Marina a little after eight-thirty in the morning, on a rather smarter launch than the Alexis which Forrest had persuaded a lawyer friend of his to lend us for the day. Her name was Diogenes, which considering she belonged to a lawyer was pretty ironic.

It was cold but calm out in the harbour. I wore a quilted anorak and a peaked denim cap and a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses. Gilly wore a thick red knitted jacket and matching ski-hat, with tight stretch designer jeans, and I think she looked sexier then than at any time since I had met her; and I told her so.

She kissed me on the tip of my cold nose. 'Just for that, you can take me out for dinner tonight,' she told me. Edward watched us balefully from the other side of the launch.

'You're not scared of ghostly retribution?' I asked her.

'I've been thinking about that. Maybe I let my emotions run away with me. Anyway, a ghost is hardly likely to attack us for eating together, is it?'

'That's all you've got in mind?'

'Sure,' she grinned. 'What have you got in mind?'

The advantage of borrowing the Diogenes was that she was fitted with a Decca navigation system; and so Dan Bass was able to steer us right on to the spot that Duglass Evelith had pinpointed as the place where the David Dark’s sole survivor had found himself swimming in the ocean.

Dan said, 'It's more than likely that there was quite a time-lapse in between the moment when the ship sank and the moment when the sailor was able to assess his position; so let's assume that the wreck is probably upwind of here; or upwind in relation to the wind that must have been blowing at the time. We'll drop a buoy here, to use as a datum point, but I think we should search in a box towards the north-east, maybe a half-mile square.'

So we began the long and tedious business of a parallel search. Dan and Edward had put together an impressive partnership of sonar scanners, similar to the equipment that had been used to locate the wreck of the Mary Rose. There was a side-scanner, housed in a torpedo-shaped drogue, which could simultaneously search the surface of the sea-bed for 500 feet both to port and to starboard; and a very powerful and high-quality echo-sounder which not only mapped the ocean floor but the underlying layers of sediment beneath it.

Once you knew roughly where to look, this combination of scanners was remarkably effective. In 1967, a namesake of Dan's, Dr George Bass, had found in two mornings a visible Roman wreck which nobody had been able to locate before, not even after a whole month of searching with underwater television cameras. Even when they were searching for the Mary Rose in the muddy depths of the Solent, Alexander McKee and his companions had located the wreck after only four days of scanning.

Edward came up and stood beside me as the drogue was trailed overboard. 'Any luck with your father-in-law?' he asked me.

'I haven't spoken to him since the weekend,' I said.

'We're going to need some money urgently once we locate this wreck.'

'Can't we just bring up the copper vessel?' I asked him. 'Surely that wouldn't be too expensive.'

'The copper vessel is only part of it,' said Edward. 'Do you realize what's down there? A late 17th-century ship, most of it intact, if the Mary Rose experience is anything to go by. It's not just the copper vessel we want, it's the whole thing, the whole environment. There could be all kinds of artifacts down there that will tell us how they intended to dispose of Mictantecutli, and who was on board the ship, and how they managed to keep the demon incarcerated. If we bring up the copper vessel and nothing else, we'll only get a quarter of the story; and, besides, I'm afraid that once the location of the wreck becomes public knowledge, there's a high risk of it being pillaged by souvenir-hunters. But, we'll get Mictantecutli up just as quickly as we possibly can.'

He was right about the souvenir-hunters, of course. Even while we were doing nothing more than burbling gently up and down, two or three boats approached us and asked us what we were looking for. 'Any treasure down there?' one of the boat-men shouted; and he wasn't joking. Amateur divers would risk their lives to bring up a piece of carving from a sunken schooner; or a rusty fowling-piece; or a few roughly-minted coins. Dan Bass called back that we were looking for a friend's powerboat, which had accidentally flooded and sunk. The boat waited around for a while, until the owners decided that we weren't doing anything particularly interesting, and roared off.

We ate a picnic lunch of spiced chicken and fish enchiladas out on deck, washed down with a couple of bottles of California wine. Then we resumed the search, cruising up and down in 100-foot swathes; up to the line of the datum buoy, and then back again. The wind began to rise a little, and the Diogenes began to dip and rise in a way which played unsettling games with my lunch. Gilly-said, 'This could take days. The bottom of the sea is flat as a pancake around here.'

Forrest put in, 'We're relying on information supplied by a half-drowned sailor from 290 years ago. Maybe he got it all wrong; maybe the beacons he thought he saw weren't beacons, but house-lights, or flares. I'm beginning to think this damned wreck isn't down here at all.'

'Hold it,' said Jimmy, who had been sitting in front of the scanner print-cuts. He pointed to the smudgy trace from the side-scanner, which had suddenly shown a hiccup. There's something right there, some kind of interruption in the natural ripple patterns.' He turned to the echo-sounder print-out, and, sure enough, there was a noticeable disturbance in the sub-stratum below the surface of the sea-bed.

'Gentlemen, I think we may have something,' said Jimmy. He waited until the trace had unrolled a few more inches, then he tore it out of the machine and laid it on our chart-table. 'You see this? There's something down there all right, under the mud. And look at the pattern from the side-scanner.'

Edward said, 'If that isn't a scour-mark caused by a sunken wreck, then I'm a Chinaman.'

The amount of Chinese food you eat, I'm beginning to wonder,' said Gilly.

'Gilly, this could be the greatest discovery in modern marine archaeology,' Edward told her. 'Do you understand what this is? A disturbance under the sea-bed that could only have been caused by a buried ship; and a ship of some considerable size, too. What do you think, Dan? A 100 tonner?'

'Hard to say,' remarked Dan Bass. 'I don't even want to say that it's a ship until I've dived down and taken a look.'

We spent the next hour scanning and re-scanning the ocean floor, right over the spot where we had first discovered the disturbance. Each print-out seemed to confirm our suspicions that we had at last located the wreck of the David Dark, and gradually we grew more and more excited. I didn't dare to think about the possible consequences of bringing her up to the surface, or what would happen when we found the copper vessel, so I did my best to push all thoughts of Mictantecutli to the back of my mind, and join in the bustle and self-congratulation with everybody else.

Only Gilly noticed that my enthusiasm was forced. She suddenly looked across at me, and said, 'Are you all right? John? Are you all right?'

'Sure. Just a little tired, I guess.'

'Something's bothering you.' '

'You know me so well already?'.

'I know you better than anybody else on board.' She came over and held my arm, and stared at me seriously.

'You're worried,' she said. 'I can always tell when somebody's worried.'

'Oh, yes?'

'Is it the wreck that's worrying you? Do you really, believe they're going to find a demon in it? I mean, a demon"?'

'There's something down there,' I told her. 'Believe you me.'

'Well,' she said. 'I'll protect you.'

I kissed her forehead. 'If only you could.'

The tide was on the turn, and Dan Bass had estimated; that there was time for one ten-minute dive over the spot where we had located the disturbance. We weighed anchor and raised the diving-flags, while Dan and Edward changed into their white wetsuits, and the rest of us stood around and chafed our hands in the rapidly-cooling wind. Dan and Edward went over the side without a word, and we leaned on the rail and watched their spectral white shapes swimming away under the murky water. (

'Are you going to dive again?' Gilly asked me. 'If this is actually the wreck of the David Dark, then ‹yes. But first of all I'll get Dan to give me a few lessons in the pool at Forest River Park. It's salt water there, so t if you swallow it you have a really authentic taste of ocean.'

We waited for almost 15 minutes for Edward and Dan to reappear. Each of them had 20 minutes of air, so we weren't too worried about their safety, but all the same the tidal stream was beginning to flow more strongly now, and the waves were becoming choppier, and if they were tired they were going to find it hard work swimming back to the launch again.

Jimmy brushed back his hair with his hand. 'I hope they haven't run into anything weird,' he said; and he was expressing the fear that all of us felt. He checked his watch. 'If they don't come up in five minutes, I'm going in after them. Forrest, help me get into my suit, will you?'

‘I’ll come with you,' said Forrest.

But Jimmy had only managed to strip off his shirt when two fluorescent orange heads bobbed to the surface only 50 or 60 feet away, and Edward and Dan came swimming methodically back to the diving-lines which trailed all the way around the Diogenes' hull. Edward, before we pulled him in, gave us the St Louis taxi-drivers' signal, which meant that everything was okay.

He tugged off his mask, rubbed the water out of his beard, and looked at us all triumphantly. 'She's there,' he said, 'I'm certain of it. There's a scour-pit which looks as if it was caused by a buried wreck, about 130 feet in length. Tomorrow we'll go down with air-hoses, and see if we can blow some of the sediment away.'

Dan Bass was less sure of our find; but agreed that it was the most likely trace so far. 'The visibility's real bad down there at the moment; you can hardly see your hand in front of your mask. But there's something there, you can make out the shape of the mound that it's made. It's worth taking another look.'

We logged the point exactly with landmarks and compass bearings. We didn't want to leave a marker-buoy, in case some nosey treasure-hunter decided to go down and take a look at what we'd been up to.

Edward came up to me, half-dressed in a polo-neck sweater and an athletic supporter, and said, 'Do you think you can have another go at your father-in-law? See if you can persuade him to rustle up some money. If this really is the David Dark, we're going to need a proper diving-ship, and excavation facilities, and a way of bringing her up once we've dug her out of the mud. We're going to need extra divers, too, professionals.'

‘I’ll try,' I said, reluctantly. 'He didn't seem too enthusiastic about it the last time I spoke to him.'

'You sure have a cute ass, Edward,' said Jimmy, walking past. 'What do you think, Gilly? Doesn't Edward have a cute ass?'

'To tell you the truth, I was admiring the clouds,' said Gilly.

Edward said, 'Come on, John. Give it another try, hunh? Ask him. He can only say no.'

'All right,' I agreed. 'Let me take those sonar traces along. Perhaps I'll convince him.'

As the sky began to darken, we sailed back into Salem. The first lights began to sparkle in the streets, and there was a strong smell of salt on the wind.

'You know that Salem was named for «Shalom», the word for peace,' said Edward reflectively.

'Let's hope we can bring it some,' I replied, and Gilly, behind me, said, 'Amen.'