Terrors (29 page)

Even as the first spray of the onrushing waters spattered her mid-night-tinted uniform sleeve, the Captain slammed the hatch shut and turned its dogs to seal the submersible
against the waters of the Saharan Sea.

Soon all had refreshed themselves and reassembled in the Captain’s conference room. Hot coffee spiked with strong brandy was served, along with nourishing sandwiches. Outside
Rosny’s
oblong panels of glass, marine creatures swam up to this strange invader of their realm and studied its occupants with as much curiosity as the men and women of
Rosny
exhibited
toward them.

In a corner of the room, My Lady Bast, her coat now restored to its proper state, enjoyed a treat of fresh fish and rich cream.

At the table, the explorers gave their complementary reports on their experiences in the ancient tomb. Speranza Verde took special note of Shipley-Blue’s unexpected heroism. “Beneath this
senza pretese
, how you say, unassuming exterior, eh, there beats
the heart of a lion. I salute you, Sir Shepley.”

The Englishman turned away shyly. “One c-couldn’t abandon that
splendid c-cat, you know.” Even in the artificial light of
Rosny’s
cabin, his furious blush was obvious.

At the end, it was Colonel White who asked Herr Siegfried Schwartz, “What was it that the monster said before it died?”

The German stroked his beard as if in deep thought. “To
understand what said the creature, Mein Herr White, it was for me not easy. Its language that of ancient Egypt was almost, but certain differences there were.”

He paused and drained his cup. When it was refilled he instructed the crewmember to omit the coffee.

“I think it said, ‘My parents for me will come. Someday my father and mother for me will come.’ You see, Herr Colonel, to us a great
monster it was, but in truth that sleeping creature that we awakened, that we killed, of its own kind was a baby.”

The sun woke Splash Shanahan that morning as it did every morning he spent aboard the
Goby
. He didn’t have an alarm clock aboard the battered sloop and he wouldn’t wear a wrist-watch. He was willing to keep an old Seth Thomas in the binnacle to use along with tide tables when he wasn’t sailing by sight of the stars, the wind on a wetted thumb, and the feeling in his
guts that had saved his life in the Great War. He’d always had an instinct for survival, and part of that instinct was the ability to know where he was on land or sea.

He wasn’t sure that he was grateful for that instinct. It had brought him alive from the disaster aboard the USS
Cichlid
, one of the feeble steam-driven submersibles that the United States Navy called submarines, the only crewman
to survive
Cichlid’s
encounter with a German flotilla in the North Atlantic. The gem of that flotilla, the light cruiser
Regensburg
, had dumped half a dozen depth charges in the vicinity of the
Cichlid
and the American submarine’s hull had cracked like an eggshell.

The sub had plunged two miles straight down, carrying fifty-five officers and men to their doom. The lucky ones were killed outright,
or drowned in a matter of minutes. The others were trapped in an iron tomb, waiting for the air to run out and with it their lives. They might have lived for hours, even days, before the oxygen aboard
Cichlid
was exhausted and they suffocated in the stale exhalations of their own breath.

But Torpedoman Third Class Seamus “Splash” Shanahan’s gut had saved his life.

He tried not to think of that
frightful day a decade before, he tried not to think about it during his waking hours and he prayed not to dream about it when he slept, and usually he managed to keep his mind on the present and out of the past.

Usually.

Shanahan stretched, sighted in on Mount Fatmalapa, and hauled in the sea anchor that had kept
Goby
in her place during the dark hours. He set course for the narrow strait between
the islands of Nguna and Pele. A soft easterly breeze filled
Goby’s
canvas. Shanahan posted himself at the helm and tacked skillfully through the strait. The waters of the Coral Sea were crystal clear, and fishes peered fearlessly at the little sloop as Shanahan made for the tiny settlement of Sivin on the northern shore of Efaté.

As he guided
Goby
toward the shoreline he encountered native fishing
craft headed out to sea. The Ni Vanuatu had seen white men before, they recognized Shanahan and exchanged greetings with him as they passed.

He’d been sailing the waters of Vanuatu for four years now, getting to know the scores of islands in the archipelago and learning the languages and beliefs of the Ni Vanuatu, the people of the Land Eternal. He was one of a special breed of men—and the occasional
woman—who plied the waters of the Western Pacific in small craft, alone or in two’s or three’s, eking a living from the sea and the islands that dotted its vast spectacular stretches. They were a strange fraternity, crossing paths and meeting occasionally, whether in Tarawa or Truk, Ponape or Palau. They had their own culture, their own code, and their own crude set of ethics. They had their
legends, including the legend of the Treasure of the Red Robe Men, and tales of the Sea Lynx, a beautiful woman who sailed alone and could face down any man who challenged her to drinking bout or knife fight.

For the most part they got along well enough with the natives who populated the islands where they dropped anchor, and most of them learned more about the ways and the beliefs of these peoples
than any university professor could ever hope to learn.

Not that Shanahan was a scholar devoted to the study of native cultures. He was a practical man, had always been a practical man. He had rebuilt the
Goby
with his bare hands, restoring a near derelict sloop,
and launched her from a pair of davits in a little shipyard on San Francisco Bay. He then taught himself the art of seamanship by exploring
the bay and its tributaries as far upstream as Suisun City. When he was confident of his skills he had ventured past the Golden Gate, into the Pacific as far as the Farralon Islands, then back through the welcoming Golden Gate.

Little by little he had extended the range of his expeditions, until he was ready to challenge the ocean, and he had done it and won. The shattered survivor of the destruction
of the
Cichlid
had emerged a broad-shouldered, iron-thewed, sharp-eyed and keen-witted miniature giant of a man. Barely five-and-a-half feet tall, he could wade into a sailor’s bar anywhere in the world, give away fifty pounds to a rough-hewn opponent, and more than hold his own with fists or with knife.

He would not use a firearm. Not in these bar room encounters and not in any other situation.
He was a throwback, if you will, to an earlier age when warriors faced each other and fought to the death if needs be, using only muscle and bone and blade. A throwback, something of a misfit in the world of the Twentieth Century, but he had made peace with himself, peace by withdrawing from the surroundings of skyscrapers and motor cars, and making a life for himself on a tiny sailboat that plied
the currents of the mighty Pacific Ocean.

Shanahan had slept well aboard the
Goby;
now he raised enough canvas to catch the morning breeze and bring the sloop close to the sandy beach. He could see the
Goby’s
shadow moving across the white sea-bottom. Grotesque crabs scuttled away. Brightly colored fish, their curiosity satisfied, darted away from the sloop.

Sivin didn’t even have a pier. The
Ni Vanuatu used both single-hull and catamaran canoes. The beach was wide and smooth and they simply pulled the canoes onto the sand when they weren’t putting out to sea. Shanahan couldn’t quite do that, but he consulted the tide tables and brought the
Goby
in to two feet of bright, clear water at high tide. With her cast-iron keel hauled up, the sloop drew remarkably little water. Once the tide
went back out the
Goby
would beach herself on the smooth sand. Shanahan only had to wait for another high tide to haul anchor and sail away.

The town of Sivin consisted of a handful of native fishermen’s huts, a tiny trading station, and the inevitable saloon. Shanahan made his way into the trading station. He was wearing his customary striped shirt and faded jeans. He owned a pair of shoes but
he hadn’t worn
them in so long that he wasn’t sure where they were any longer.

A few Ni Vanuatu were visible in the town. A couple of old women worked at weaving baskets of palm fronds and the tough local grass. Naked children played in the dirt. There was no sign of the few men of the village but that was no surprise to Shanahan. He knew they would be fishing from the catamaran canoes they favored.
Contrary to the images of popular fiction and romantic motion pictures, the natives of these islands did not live a life of dreamlike idylls. They rose before the dawn and paddled their craft to the coral reefs where they knew the finest eating fish made their homes. No doubt they had observed Shanahan’s sloop as they made their way to their fishing grounds. He had not bothered them; they
would not bother him.

To the east of Sivin the shoreline dipped away forming the U-shaped Undine Bay. Directly south of the town rose lush tropical rain forest. To the west the land rose sharply forming a steep escarpment that dropped vertically to the shore. Here also was the mouth of Valeva Cave, accessible from the beach when the tide was out but flooded to invisibility when the waters rolled
in.

Here in the village, one of the old women looked up from her basket and addressed him in the local pidgin. It was Bislama all right, the common pidgin used throughout the Vanuatu chain, but Shanahan knew that there were endless variations and dialects, even one that borrowed more from the French language than from English, and the one the old woman spoke sounded strange in his ears.

Even
so, he addressed her. “Good morning, Mother. Is there a white man who runs the station?”

The old woman smiled at Shanahan.
“Yu toktok Bislama?”

“Ating, ating. Yu oraet, Mother?”

“Yes.”

Clearly the old woman was delighted to be addressed in Bislama. Whether she knew enough standard English to carry on a conversation, Shanahan could only guess. But even his limited command of the local pidgin
had won him a friend.

“
Mi stop lukaot bos blong
.” There had to be a white man around. The trading station wouldn’t have been left as it was unless someone was in charge.

The old woman nodded toward the saloon. “
Longwe
.”

Shanahan thanked her and headed for the saloon. The whole conversation had probably been unnecessary; all he had to do was poke
his head inside the grass hut and he’d know.
But he was reluctant to do that. Even as he crossed the few yards that separated the basket-weavers from the saloon, he stopped to exchange a few words in Bislama with the naked children who stood gazing at him as if he had just descended from the moon instead of arriving aboard the
Goby
.

It took all of Shanahan’s reserve to step across the wooden threshold of the saloon. Moving from the bright
sunlight in what had to pass for a village square into the coolly shaded interior of the saloon was a gut-wrenching act.

Shanahan had been a drunk. There was no other word for it. He’d beaten the bottle but stepping into this musty, cramped building was both painfully difficult and at the same time far too easy. The smell of stale liquor was too welcoming, the friendly bottles ranged behind the
bar seemed to smile at him. The rickety chairs summoned him. And there was the figure behind the bar, a total stranger to Shanahan but one he had seen in a thousand bar rooms in a hundred cities from Providence to San Diego.

Shanahan shook his head, clearing it of memories that sometimes came to him uninvited. He tossed his prematurely iron-gray hair out of his eyes and made his way into the
trading station. It was cool and dim in the station’s single, tiny room. The place seemed to be deserted. He hallooed but there was no response. The station’s stock was visible: a couple of bolts of cloth, a few hats, half a dozen gleaming knives. The knives were displayed in a glass case. The glass looked heavy, the case was screwed to the floor and its lid was padlocked.

But the trading station
sold something else, something that Shanahan had known all too intimately in the past. He had set foot in a saloon in Sivin, one of the smaller towns on the island of Efaté in Vanuatu.

“Well I’ll be damned,” the man behind the bar grumbled, “if it isn’t a white man. To what do I owe the honor of the occasion?”

He could have stepped out of a magazine like the ones Shanahan and his friends passed
around during the long, slow hours on board the
Cichlid
. His hair was white, his skin was sun-darkened, he even wore the rumpled linen suit that seemed to be a uniform for Europeans gone to seed in the South Seas.

“I’m here to stock up on water and supplies,” Shanahan told him. “And I have a few trade goods you might want to buy for your store.”

“
Ach
, the Ni Vanuatu aren’t very interested in
trade.” The man spoke with a nondescript accent that might have been Dutch or German or
any of half a dozen other languages in origin. “But I’ll look at your stock.” He looked around almost as if he was startled to find himself here. “I don’t know why I keep this bar open. Law says I cannot sell alcohol to the natives and white men are so rare hereabouts, it is hardly worth the trouble.”

He lifted
a glass. “But I sample my own wares now and again.” He tossed back a shot of whatever was in the glass and grinned. “That was good.” He looked Shanahan up and down. “What is your name and what do have to sell to me and what do you want to buy?”

The sailor settled in to do his trading. It was a precarious existence, but it kept him going.

“Seamus Shanahan,” he told the bartender, “but mostly
they call me Splash. I have some copra on my sloop. I don’t imagine you’d be interested. Some nice native carvings from up around Ewose and Makura way.”