Death Trance

Thirty-Two

The co-operative Mr Walcott of the Salem Salvage Company turned out to be a short, broad-shouldered, Slavic-looking man with shaggy gray eyebrows and a vocabulary that consisted chiefly of 'C'd be' and 'Likely that's so', two forms of non-committal agreement that after only half an hour of sailing I began to find extremely irksome and frustrating.

Mr Walcott said that his mother had been Polish and his father had been English, and that between the two of them they had brought up a family that had been part mad, part romantic, part frosty, and part inspirational, and that was all he was going to say in the matter. He helped Quamus to load the dynamite boxes on to the deck of his diving-boat, a greasy 90-foot lugger that I had noticed several times moored up at the less savoury end of Salem Terminal Wharf; then he started up the diesels, and we left the quayside without any delay.

It was a chilly morning, but the sea was calm, and I was confident that I would be able to cope with the diving conditions. I wasn't at all sure about the dynamite, but I kept telling myself that it was all for Jane; and that if I played my part in this carefully and wisely, I would soon have her restored to me. It was an extraordinary thought, but if Mictantecutli kept his promise, it was possible that I might even have her back by tonight.

Quamus touched my shoulder, and beckoned me back to the lugger's after-deck, where our diving-gear was all laid out. A young girl with short-cropped blonde hair and a smudge of oil on her nose was checking the regulator valves on the oxygen cylinders. She wore identical denim overalls to Mr Walcott, and her eyes were the same sharp blue, and from her stocky, busty build I took her at once to be Mr Walcott's daughter. She said, 'Hi,' and looked at us skeptically, a gray-haired Indian of anything between 60 and 300 years old; and a nervous antique dealer in a dark blue business coat.

'You guys want to get ready?' she asked. ‘I’m Laurie, Laurie Walcott. Either of you guys ever dive before?'

'Of course,' I told her, trying to be sharp.

'I just asked,' she said, and threw me a Neoprene wet suit. It wasn't like the pristine white wet suit that Edward and Forrest had lent me: it was gray and smelly, like a discarded walrus-skin, and its wrinkles were clogged with damp talcum powder. The oxygen cylinders, too, were battered and well-worn, as if they had been used to beat off marauding sharks. I guess I had to remember that Walcott was a professional salvage diver, not one of your weekend tyros. Walcott called them 'floating faggots.'

Quamus said, 'If you wish, you can change your mind. It is not good to dive if you are full of fear. Mr Evelith will understand.'

'Do I look that frightened?' I asked him.

'I would choose the word "apprehensive",' said Quamus, with the hint of an ironic smile.

'You've been reading "It Pays To Increase Your Word Power," ' I retorted.

'No, Mr Trenton. I have simply been reading your face.'

When Dan Bass had piloted us out to the David Dark, he fiddled around for almost five minutes, positioning the Diogenes over the site of the wreck. But Mr Walcott, with his deeply-bitten pipe clenched between his teeth, and his oily cap pulled well down over his eyes, swung his lugger around as if it were a Harley-Davidson, right on the datum point, and lowered his anchor so accurately that when we dived we found it caught between the David Dark’s upright fashion-pieces.

Now Walcott came back to the after-deck, and started up the one-ton Atlas-Copco compressor. This huge machine rattled and coughed and sent up blurts of black smoke, but Walcott assured it was the best in the business. It would release a jet of compressed air down a 100-foot hose, and this would hopefully excavate a hole alongside the sunken hull of the David Dark large enough and deep enough for our dynamite.

I was surprised that Walcott asked no questions about what we were doing, or why, but presumably Quamus had paid him to keep his curiosity to himself. Laurie sat on the lugger's rail, chewing a huge mouthful of Bazooka Joe, and staring at the distant horizon as if the whole business were too boring for words.

At a few minutes after nine o'clock, Quamus and I rolled backwards off the lugger's side, and began our dive. Luckily, the water in the harbour was unusually clear, and it only took a few minutes for us to descend to the bottom. We quickly located the wreck, and Quamus tugged on the shot-line to tell Walcott to feed us with compressed air.

I looked at Quamus through my blinkered face-mask. Physically, he was remarkably muscular, and in his wetsuit he looked as if he had been hewn out of solid granite. It was his eyes that interested me the most, though. Framed in his oval face-mask, they looked serious and reflective, as if life had passed him by so many times that no crisis could surprise him any longer; as if he were quite ready for death, whenever it eventually came. I wondered whether old man Evelith had been pulling my leg when he had told me that Quamus had been at Billington over a hundred years ago; I knew that some families gave their servants 'below-stairs' names, so that butler after butler was always called James, no matter what they had actually been christened. The Quamus who had given piggybacks to Duglass Evelith's father had probably been this Quamus' father.

The compressed air spurted out of the six-inch hose with a sudden wallop, and for a moment I almost lost my grip on it. There was a compensator on the hose which prevented any diver who was using it from being jet-propelled all around the sea-bed; but all the same it felt as if it had a life of its own, and after two or three minutes of blasting away at the silt on the bottom of the sea, my arms were aching and my back felt as if I had deputized for Lon Chancy in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

We worked almost blind, because of the dense clouds of silt which the airhose blew up all around us. On our second dive, we would use an airlift, which would clear most of the silt away, but on this dive Quamus had to break through the consolidated layer of grit and shell which lay beneath the first thin coating of silt and mud and 'anchorage gash' — that assorted refuse which you always find on the bottom of the sea wherever boats are moored. To break through, Quamus used a long metal rod with a sharpened end, and once I had blown away the initial mud, he began to hack at the grit with relentless energy.

We were surrounded by whirling debris: shell, mud, startled hermit-crabs, slipper limpets, clams, and grotesque sponges. I felt as if our underwater world had gone mad, an Alice-in-Wonderland turmoil of shellfish, silt, and bobbing Coca-Cola bottles. But after ten minutes' work, Quamus gripped my arm and squeezed it twice, which was our pre-arranged signal that the first dive was over. Quamus thrust his iron rod into the hole he had made, and marked it with a bright orange flag. Then he finned slowly up to the surface, and I followed him.

'How's it going?' asked Walcott, helping us onboard.

'You're kicking up enough mud down there.' He pointed to the surface of the bay, where a wide muddy stain was already spreading above the wreck.

'We're through to the lower layer of silt,' said Quamus, impassively, as Laurie helped him out of his oxygen-cylinders. 'We should be able to start work with the airlift now.'

'Anybody asked you what we're up to?' I said.

Walcott shrugged. 'A couple of fishermen came past and asked if I knew where they could sink their lines for the best flounder. So I sent them out to Woodbury Point.'

'They won't catch much flounder there,' said Quamus.

'Exactly,' said Walcott.

We rested for fifteen minutes or so, and then Laurie kitted us up with fresh oxygen cylinders and we prepared to go down again. It was almost twenty before ten now, and I was anxious that we should complete this dive as soon as possible. I didn't want the coastguard prowling around; nor did I want Edward or Forrest or Dan Bass to notice that Walcott's lugger was anchored right over the wreck of the David Dark. For all I knew, they might be planning to dive on the wreck themselves this morning, to put down markers before they registered it.

For a further half-hour, Quamus and I toiled away on the bottom of the sea, blowing away the silt from the side of the David Dark’s hull. At last, we saw dark encrusted timbers, and Quamus made the 'okay' sign to indicate that we were making good progress. With only three or four minutes of oxygen left, we completed a 20-foot deep scour-pit into the soft silt down beside the hull, which Quamus marked with his flag. Then he made the thumb's-up sign for 'surface'.

I turned around, giving a first strong kick of my fins, and to my horror I became entangled in something like wet white sheeting. I struggled and kicked against it, and as I did so I felt the soft bumping of swollen flesh inside it. It was the floating corpse of Mrs James Goult, which had somehow been drawn towards the wreck of the David Dark, either by the tidal stream, or by the air-suction work we had been doing on it, or by some other inexplicable magnetism.

Don't panic: I told myself. And I tried to remember what Dan Bass had told me, in my three lessons at Forest River Park. I reached for my knife, tugged it out, and tried to cut the floating wet shroud away from me. My blood thundered in my ears, and my breathing sounded like a railroad locomotive. I ripped through linen, cut through seams, but the fabric seemed to billow all around me and entangle me even more.

In total fright, I felt the corpse bump against me again, and its arms somehow wrap themselves around my legs, making it impossible for me to kick myself to the surface. At that same moment, with a squeaky sigh, my oxygen ran out, and I realized I had less than two minutes to make it up to the surface before I suffocated.

Thrashing, panicking, I began to sink slowly to the seabed, the corpse embracing me like a long-lost lover. Is that what Mictantecutli wanted after all? I thought to myself. Did he really want me, and me alone, because my unborn son had cheated him of the chance to feast on my heart? I sucked desperately at my mouthpiece, but my oxygen was completely exhausted, and my lungs began to feel as if they were going to collapse from lack of air.

It was then that the corpse shuddered, and suddenly whirled away. The shroud was dragged off me, and my arms and legs were disentangled. My face-mask clear, I saw Quamus rolling away from me in the murky water, brandishing his iron shaft. On the end of it, deeply impaled, was the blue-skinned, half-decayed body of Mrs Goult, chunks of flesh flaking off her like rotting tuna. Quamus gave her one last twist, and then sent her sinking slowly down to the bottom, the shaft still sticking out of her bare-ribbed chest. He swam back a little way, seized my arm, and urgently pointed upwards. I nodded. I needed no second bidding. I was almost blacking out from oxygen starvation.

Back on the lugger, shaken as both of us were, we said nothing to Walcott or his daughter about what we had seen. Laurie made us each a cup of hot black coffee, and we rested for another 15 minutes while Walcott prepared the dynamite. Each of the two crates was heavily weighted so that it would sink directly to the bottom; and then, once we had maneuvered it into position, it would sink just as quickly into our 20-foot hole.

‘Think the weather's going to hold?' I asked Walcott, finishing my coffee.

'Could be,' he remarked.

As I shouldered my next two oxygen tanks, I thought briefly of Anne Putnam: the witch who had sacrificed herself so that I would not feel obliged to let Mictantecutli go free. Well, I thought to myself, I still don't have to make a final decision, not until the copper vessel has been brought ashore; and even then I'll have time to think it over. I believed what old man Evelith had told me, about the malevolent power that Mictantecutli could wreak; but I was still strongly tempted to let the Fleshless One go free, and recover the wife and son-to-be whom I so dearly loved:

Yet how much was I kidding myself? How much of this desire to restore Jane to life was real conviction, and how much of it was ridiculous romantic bravado? I had already accepted Jane's death more than I would have thought possible. What was making love to Gilly, but an acceptance that I would never be making love to Jane again? If I had left on a six-weeks' business trip, I wouldn't have been unfaithful: I wouldn't even have thought of it. Yet Jane had been dead now for very little longer than that, and here I was going to bed with another woman.

More than that: what kind of relationship was I going to be able to have with Jane, once and if she was restored to life? What do you say to somebody who's been dead and buried?

I was still thinking about this when Quamus gripped my arm, and said, 'Time to go, Mr Trenton. Second-to-last dive.'

Planting the dynamite proved to be the easiest job of all. All we had to do was tumble it end over end until it was perched on the brink of the hole we had excavated, connect the fuses, and let it sink slowly down. When both cases had disappeared into the darkness, Quamus and I packed as much grit and shell and debris as we could into the hole, to make sure that the full force of the explosion would be directed towards the hull of the David Dark. As we swam back to the surface, paying out fuse from a small reel, I thought of Edward, and what he would have said if he had known what we were doing. I actually felt sorry for him. In a minute or two, we would be shattering the dream of his life.

Think of the devil, however: when we broke the surface of the water, and began to splash our way back towards Walcott's lugger, what should appear around the bow of the lugger but the Diogenes, with Edward and Forrest and Jimmy standing on the foredeck, and Dan Bass at the wheel.

Quamus glanced at me, and I made a rotating action with my hand to indicate that he should continue to pay out the fuse. We reached the lugger and heaved ourselves up the side. Laurie and Walcott helped us on to the foredeck, and for a moment we lay there like two landed sealions, gasping for breath; but it was obvious that Edward wasn't going to give us any rest. He beckoned Dan to guide the Diogenes right in close to Walcott's lugger, and cupped his hands around his mouth.

'Mr Walcott!' he shouted. 'John! What's going on here? What are you up to?'

'Just showing Quamus the David Dark, that's all,' I shouted back.

'In a salvage boat? And what's all that waterjet and airlift gear doing on deck?'

'Mind your own business,' I told him. 'This wreck doesn't belong to anybody. It's unregistered. If we want to do a little excavation of our own, that's up to us.'

'The David Dark is registered now,' Edward shouted. 'I just registered her this morning. Gilly called me up from Tewksbury and said that you'd gone off early with a whole lot of equipment.'

Thanks, Gilly, I thought to myself. Judas in linen and lace.

'Well, registered or not, we still have a perfect right to be here,' I told Edward.

'You want me to prove you wrong?' demanded Edward. 'You want me to call the coastguard and have you moved away? This wreck is private property now, and part-owned by the city of Salem. Any vessel suspected of carrying out diving or unauthorized salvage anywhere in the vicinity is liable to be impounded, and the owners fined. So move out.'

'Edward,' I said, 'I thought you and I were friends.'

'Apparently we made a mistake,' said Edward. And without saying anything else, he turned away, and directed Dan Bass to turn the Diogenes about.

'Quamus,' I said, without moving. 'Light the fuse. Mr Walcott, start your engines and get us the hell out of here.'

Quamus said, 'You will not warn your colleagues?'

'My ex-colleagues, you mean? Sure I'll warn them. But get that fuse lit first.'

Quamus struck a match, cupped his hands over the end of the fuse, and held the flame against the fabric until the explosive core of the fuse ignited. It was a fast-burning fuse, 120 cm a minute, and it quickly sparkled over the side of the lugger and disappeared under the surface of the sea. There was a light cloud of smoke, and a rush of bubbles, and then it was gone.

Walcott gunned the lugger's engines, and it was then that I yelled out to Edward: 'Get going! Move! Fast as you can! Explosives!'

I saw Edward, Forrest and Jimmy stare across at me, startled. They looked at each other in amazement, and then they looked back at me.

Edward shouted: 'What did you say? Explosives?'

'Going off now!' I screamed at him, as the lugger heeled off towards the Granitehead shore. 'Get out of there quick!'

There was a moment's silence; then the Diogenes' engine blared into life, and the little boat began to move away, slowly at first, but quickly building up speed. It had only travelled about 50 yards, however, when there was a curious shaking in the ocean, a sensation quite unlike anything that I had ever felt before. It was like an earthquake, only more vertiginous, as if the world were falling into separate pieces, as if sky were becoming detached from ocean, and ocean were becoming detached from land. I felt as if we were all going to fly weightless into the air, boats, compressors, flags, diving-suits, and everything.

Then, the surface of the sea burst apart. With a thunderous roar, an immense cliff of solid water rose into the air, 50 or 100 feet, and hung there in the morning air. A shock-wave pressed against my ears, suppressing the clatter of tons of brine as it collapsed back into the sea, but my ears cleared again in time to hear the echo coming back from the Granitehead Hills, as clear as a cannon-shot.

The deck of the lugger angled and bucked beneath our feet, and we had to cling to the rails to steady ourselves. But the Diogenes, which was much nearer the centre of the blast, was swamped first by falling water, and then by a miniature tidal-wave, which broke over her stern and must have gushed into her open hatches unchecked.

Edward didn't seek our help. He must have been too shocked and angry. Instead, I could see him helping the others to bail out, while Dan Bass gently nursed the hiccupping engine, and steered the Diogenes back towards Salem Harbour. There weren't even any shouts of recrimination, or threats of calling the coastguard; but I knew that Edward would immediately report our piratical behaviour both to the coastguard and to the Salem police, and that we would be lucky to get back to shore without being arrested.

'What do we do now?' asked Walcott. 'The minute that busybody gets back into harbour, the cops are going to be swarming around us like bluefish.'

'We must salvage the copper vessel,' Quamus insisted.

'Disregard the police. The copper vessel is more important.'

'As long as your precious Mr Evelith guarantees to bail me out of jail,' snapped Walcott.

'Mr Evelith will guarantee your complete immunity from prosecution,' said Quamus, and the way he looked at Walcott, there wasn't any way that Walcott was going to argue. Walcott was tough, but Quamus was imperious, his expression as stony as the side of a building.

Walcott and his daughter began to unpack the salvage floats which were stowed around the sides of the after-deck. There were twenty of these, and the idea was to attach them to the copper vessel, once we had located it, and then inflate them with compressed air, so that the copper vessel would rise to the surface and could then be towed into harbour like a raft.

By now, the ocean all around us was bubbling and boiling with rising silt and surfacing debris. There were scores of dead fish, floating white-belly upwards, flounder and dabs, mostly, and a few bluefish. There were blackened elm timbers, carlings and deck supports and broken staves, presumably from the ship's supply-barrels, and fragments of masts and rigging-blocks.

'You're not going to dive into the middle of that,' said Walcott, looking down into the disturbed surface of the sea. 'Give it a half-hour to clear up, first. Otherwise you'll never find each other, let alone a copper trunk.'

'Half an hour may be too long,' said Quamus, narrowing his eyes towards the shore. 'The coastguard could be here by then.'

'Look,' said Walcott, 'I don't mind taking risks. I don't even mind a run-in with the coastguard. I'm used to it. But I'm not taking any responsibility for you and your pal diving into an ocean that's thick with dangerous debris. Just forget it.'

'We can take our own responsibility,' said Quamus.

'Maybe you can,' Walcott retorted, 'but you can't dive without oxygen, and you're not diving with any of mine.'

Quamus stared at Walcott with such intense disapproval that Walcott had to chew on his pipe, and look away. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'But if you dive into that little lot, anything could happen.'

We watched for another five minutes as more and more pieces of broken wood rose to the surface. Soon the whole area around Walcott's lugger was littered with thousands of pieces of dark timber, the remains of one of the most historic archaeological finds in recent history. It looked as if the dynamite had completely shattered the fragile wreck of the David Dark into flinders. To piece it all together again out of this floating collection of firewood would be impossible. But I didn't feel guilty. I knew that I had done what was necessary; and that sometimes human life has to come before human culture.

From Salem Harbour, we suddenly heard the distant whoop of a police-boat siren, and saw its flashing red-and-white lights. Quamus seized Walcott's arm, and said, 'Now we must dive.'

'I'm sorry,' protested Walcott, 'it's still too risky down there.'

Quamus stared at Walcott with wide-open eyes. Walcott tried to look somewhere else, but Quamus somehow dragged his attention back again. I watched, puzzled, while Quamus stared and stared, the muscles flinching in his cheeks, and Walcott stared back at him, with an expression on his face of growing horror, like a man who realizes that his car is out of control and that he's inevitably going to crash.

'I — ' gasped Walcott, but then his nose suddenly sprang with blood, and he collapsed to his knees on the deck. Laurie knelt down beside him, and gave him an oily cloth to mop up the blood, but even though she gave Quamus a frown of disapproval, she didn't attempt to say anything to him. I don't think I would have done, either, after a hypnotic performance like that.

'Now we must dive,' Quamus repeated.

But he was wrong. For, even while the police-boat siren grew clearer across the water, something rose to the surface amongst the bobbing raft of broken timbers. Laurie saw it first, and stood up, and said, 'Look — look, Mr Quamus. Look at that.'

We all approached the stern, and stared out at the waters of the bay. Not thirty yards away, wallowing in the waves, was a huge green casket, as long and as broad as a railroad car, but coffin-shaped, with a crucifix marked on the top of it in corroded relief.

Quamus regarded it with a face like ivory. I felt my own blood draining through me; and my heart beating in slow, irregular bumps.

Walcott said, 'Is that it? Is that what you've been trying to find?'

And Quamus nodded, and made a sign which I didn't understand, an Indian sign which looked like a blessing, or a sign to ward off evil spirits.

'It is Mictantecutli, the Fleshless One, the Man of Bones,' he said. And I watched in growing apprehension as the casket dipped and yawed in the waves, silent and strange, a vessel from a long-dead century, a relic of an antique malevolence which none of us knew if we could even begin to control.