The Moon Pool

by A. Merritt

Huldricksson, silent once more, had slumped down over the wheel.

  Da Costa’s head appeared at the top of the companion steps.

  “There is nobody, nobody,” he paused—then—“nobody—nowhere!” His hands flew out in a gesture of hopeless incomprehension. “I do not understan’.”

  Then Olaf Huldricksson opened his dry lips and as he spoke a chill ran through me, checking my heart.

  “The sparkling devil took them!” croaked Olaf Huldricksson, “the sparkling devil took them! Took my Helma and my little Freda! The sparkling devil came down from the moon and took them!”

  He swayed; tears dripped down his cheeks. Da Costa moved toward him again and again Huldricksson watched him, alertly, wickedly, from his bloodshot eyes.

  I took a hypodermic from my case and filled it with morphine. I drew Da Costa to me.

  “Get to the side of him,” I whispered, “talk to him.” He moved over toward the wheel.

  “Where is your Helma and Freda, Olaf?” he said.

  Huldricksson turned his head toward him. “The shining devil took them,” he croaked. “The moon devil that spark—”

  A yell broke from him. I had thrust the needle into his arm just above one swollen wrist and had quickly shot the drug through. He struggled to release himself and then began to rock drunkenly. The morphine, taking him in his weakness, worked quickly. Soon over his face a peace dropped. The pupils of the staring eyes contracted. Once, twice, he swayed and then, his bleeding, prisoned hands held high and still gripping the wheel, he crumpled to the deck.

  With utmost difficulty we loosed the thongs, but at last it was done. We rigged a little swing and the Tonga boys slung the great inert body over the side into the dory. Soon we had Huldricksson in my bunk. Da Costa sent half his crew over to the sloop in charge of the Cantonese. They took in all sail, stripping Huldricksson’s boat to the masts and then with the Brunhilda nosing quietly along after us at the end of a long hawser, one of the Tonga boys at her wheel, we resumed the way so enigmatically interrupted.

  I cleansed and bandaged the Norseman’s lacerated wrists and sponged the blackened, parched mouth with warm water and a mild antiseptic.

  Suddenly I was aware of Da Costa’s presence and turned. His unease was manifest and held, it seemed to me, a queer, furtive anxiety.

  “What you think of Olaf, sair?” he asked. I shrugged my shoulders. “You think he killed his woman and his babee?” He went on. “You think he crazee and killed all?”

  “Nonsense, Da Costa,” I answered. “You saw the boat was gone. Most probably his crew mutinied and to torture him tied him up the way you saw. They did the same thing with Hilton of the Coral Lady; you’ll remember.”

  “No,” he said. “No. The crew did not. Nobody there on board when Olaf was tied.”

  “What!” I cried, startled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” he said slowly, “that Olaf tie himself!”

  “Wait!” he went on at my incredulous gesture of dissent. “Wait, I show you.” He had been standing with hands behind his back and now I saw that he held in them the cut thongs that had bound Huldricksson. They were blood-stained and each ended in a broad leather tip skilfully spliced into the cord. “Look,” he said, pointing to these leather ends. I looked and saw in them deep indentations of teeth. I snatched one of the thongs and opened the mouth of the unconscious man on the bunk. Carefully I placed the leather within it and gently forced the jaws shut on it. It was true. Those marks were where Olaf Huldricksson’s jaws had gripped.

  “Wait!” Da Costa repeated, “I show you.” He took other cords and rested his hands on the supports of a chair back. Rapidly he twisted one of the thongs around his left hand, drew a loose knot, shifted the cord up toward his elbow. This left wrist and hand still free and with them he twisted the other cord around the right wrist; drew a similar knot. His hands were now in the exact position that Huldricksson’s had been on the Brunhilda but with cords and knots hanging loose. Then Da Costa reached down his head, took a leather end in his teeth and with a jerk drew the thong that noosed his left hand tight; similarly he drew tight the second.

  He strained at his fetters. There before my eyes he had pinioned himself so that without aid he could not release himself. And he was exactly as Huldricksson had been!

  “You will have to cut me loose, sair,” he said. “I cannot move them. It is an old trick on these seas. Sometimes it is necessary that a man stand at the wheel many hours without help, and he does this so that if he sleep the wheel wake him, yes, sair.”

  I looked from him to the man on the bed.

  “But why, sair,” said Da Costa slowly, “did Olaf have to tie his hands?”

  I looked at him, uneasily.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Do you?”

  He fidgeted, avoided my eyes, and then rapidly, almost surreptitiously crossed himself.

  “No,” he replied. “I know nothing. Some things I have heard—but they tell many tales on these seas.”

  He started for the door. Before he reached it he turned. “But this I do know,” he half whispered, “I am damned glad there is no full moon tonight.” And passed out, leaving me staring after him in amazement. What did the Portuguese know?

  I bent over the sleeper. On his face was no trace of that unholy mingling of opposites the Dweller stamped upon its victims.

  And yet—what was it the Norseman had said?

  “The sparkling devil took them!” Nay, he had been even more explicit—“The sparkling devil that came down from the moon!”

  Could it be that the Dweller had swept upon the Brunhilda, drawing down the moon path Olaf Huldricksson’s wife and babe even as it had drawn Throckmartin?

  As I sat thinking the cabin grew suddenly dark and from above came a shouting and patter of feet. Down upon us swept one of the abrupt, violent squalls that are met with in those latitudes. I lashed Huldricksson fast in the berth and ran up on deck.

  The long, peaceful swells had changed into angry, choppy waves from the tops of which the spindrift streamed in long stinging lashes.

  A half-hour passed; the squall died as quickly as it had arisen. The sea quieted. Over in the west, from beneath the tattered, flying edge of the storm, dropped the red globe of the setting sun; dropped slowly until it touched the sea rim.

  I watched it—and rubbed my eyes and stared again. For over its flaming portal something huge and black moved, like a gigantic beckoning finger!

  Da Costa had seen it, too, and he turned the Suwarna straight toward the descending orb and its strange shadow. As we approached we saw it was a little mass of wreckage and that the beckoning finger was a wing of canvas, sticking up and swaying with the motion of the waves. On the highest point of the wreckage sat a tall figure calmly smoking a cigarette.

  We brought the Suwarna to, dropped a boat, and with myself as coxswain pulled toward a wrecked hydroairplane. Its occupant took a long puff at his cigarette, waved a cheerful hand, shouted a greeting. And just as he did so a great wave raised itself up behind him, took the wreckage, tossed it high in a swelter of foam, and passed on. When we had steadied our boat, where wreck and man had been was—nothing.

  There came a tug at the side—, two muscular brown hands gripped it close to my left, and a sleek, black, wet head showed its top between them. Two bright, blue eyes that held deep within them a laughing deviltry looked into mine, and a long, lithe body drew itself gently over the thwart and seated its dripping self at my feet.

  “Much obliged,” said this man from the sea. “I knew somebody was sure to come along when the O’Keefe banshee didn’t show up.”’

  “The what?” I asked in amazement.

  “The O’Keefe banshee—I’m Larry O’Keefe. It’s a far way from Ireland, but not too far for the O’Keefe banshee to travel if the O’Keefe was going to click in.”

  I looked again at my astonishing rescue. He seemed perfectly serious.

  “Have you a cigarette? Mine went out,” he said with a
grin, as he reached a moist hand out for the little cylinder, took it, lighted it.

  I saw a lean, intelligent face whose fighting jaw was softened by the wistfulness of the clean-cut lips and the honesty that lay side by side with the deviltry in the laughing blue eyes; nose of a thoroughbred with the suspicion of a tilt; long, well-knit, slender figure that I knew must have all the strength of fine steel; the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps of Britain’s navy.

  He laughed, stretched out a firm hand, and gripped mine.

  “Thank you really ever so much, old man,” he said.

  I liked Larry O’Keefe from the beginning—but I did not dream as the Tonga boys pulled us back to the Suwarna bow that liking was to be forged into man’s strong love for man by fires which souls such as his and mine—and yours who read this—could never dream.

  Larry! Larry O’Keefe, where are you now with your leprechauns and banshee, your heart of a child, your laughing blue eyes, and your fearless soul? Shall I ever see you again, Larry O’Keefe, dear to me as some best beloved younger brother? Larry!

  CHAPTER VII

  Larry O’ Keefe

  PRESSING BACK THE QUESTIONS I LONGED TO ASK, I INTRODUCED MYSELF. Oddly enough, I found that he knew me, or rather my work. He had bought, it appeared, my volume upon the peculiar vegetation whose habitat is disintegrating lava rock and volcanic ash, that I had entitled, somewhat loosely, I could now perceive, Flora of the Craters. For he explained naively that he had picked it up, thinking it an entirely different sort of a book, a novel in fact—something like Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, which he liked greatly.’

  He had hardly finished this explanation when we touched the side of the Suwarna, and I was forced to curb my curiosity until we reached the deck.

  “That thing you saw me sitting on,” he said, after he had thanked the bowing little skipper for his rescue, “was all that was left of one of his Majesty’s best little hydroairplanes after that cyclone threw it off as excess baggage. And by the way, about where are we?”

  Da Costa gave him our approximate position from the noon reckoning.

  O’Keefe whistled. “A good three hundred miles from where I left the H.M.S. Dolphin about four hours ago,” he said. “That squall I rode in on was some whizzer!

  “The Dolphin,” he went on, calmly divesting himself of his soaked uniform, “was on her way to Melbourne. I’d been yearning for a joy ride and went up for an alleged scouting trip. Then that blow shot out of nowhere, picked me up, and insisted that I go with it.

  “About an hour ago I thought I saw a chance to zoom up and out of it, I turned, and blick went my right wing, and down I dropped.”

  “I don’t know how we can notify your ship, Lieutenant O’Keefe,” I said. “We have no wireless.”

  “Doctair Goodwin,” said Da Costa, “we could change our course, sair—perhaps—”

  “Thanks—but not a bit of it,” broke in O’Keefe. “Lord alone knows where the Dolphin is now. Fancy she’ll be nosing around looking for me. Anyway, she’s just as apt to run into you as you into her. Maybe we’ll strike something with a wireless, and I’ll trouble you to put me aboard.” He hesitated. “Where are you bound, by the way?” he asked.

  “For Ponape,” I answered.

  “No wireless there,” mused O’Keefe. “Beastly hole. Stopped a week ago for fruit. Natives seemed scared to death at us—or something. What are you going there for?”

  Da Costa darted a furtive glance at me. It troubled me.

  O’Keefe noted my hesitation.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said. “Maybe I oughn’t to have asked that?”

  “It’s no secret, Lieutenant,” I replied. “I’m about to undertake some exploration work—a little digging among the ruins on the Nan-Matal.”

  I looked at the Portuguese sharply as I named the place. A pallor crept beneath his skin and again he made swiftly the sign of the cross, glancing as he did so fearfully to the north. I made up my mind then to question him when opportunity came. He turned from his quick scrutiny of the sea and addressed O’Keefe.

  “There’s nothing on board to fit you, Lieutenant.”

  “Oh, just give me a sheet to throw around me, Captain,” said O’Keefe and followed him. Darkness had fallen, and as the two disappeared into Da Costa’s cabin I softly opened the door of my own and listened. Huldricksson was breathing deeply and regularly.

  I drew my electric-flash, and shielding its rays from my face, looked at him. His sleep was changing from the heavy stupor of the drug into one that was at least on the borderland of the normal. The tongue had lost its arid blackness and the mouth secretions had resumed action. Satisfied as to his condition I returned to deck.

  O’Keefe was there, looking like a spectre in the cotton sheet he had wrapped about him. A deck table had been cleated down and one of the Tonga boys was setting it for our dinner. Soon the very creditable larder of the Suwarna dressed the board, and O’Keefe, Da Costa, and I attacked it. The night had grown close and oppressive. Behind us the forward light of the Brunhilda glided and the binnacle lamp threw up a faint glow in which her black helmsman’s face stood out mistily. O’Keefe had looked curiously a number of times at our tow, but had asked no questions.

  “You’re not the only passenger we picked up today,” I told him. “We found the captain of that sloop, lashed to his wheel, nearly dead with exhaustion, and his boat deserted by everyone except himself.”

  “What was the matter?” asked O’Keefe in astonishment.

  “We don’t know,” I answered. “He fought us, and I had to drug him before we could get him loose from his lashings. He’s sleeping down in my berth now. His wife and little girl ought to have been on board, the captain here says, but—they weren’t.”

  “Wife and child gone!” exclaimed O’Keefe.

  “From the condition of his mouth he must have been alone at the wheel and without water at least two days and nights before we found him,” I replied. “And as for looking for anyone on these waters after such a time—it’s hopeless.”

  “That’s true,” said O’Keefe. “But his wife and baby! Poor, poor devil!”

  He was silent for a time, and then, at my solicitation, began to tell us more of himself. He had been little more than twenty when he had won his wings and entered the war. He had been seriously wounded at Ypres during the third year of the struggle, and when he recovered the war was over. Shortly after that his mother had died. Lonely and restless, he had re-entered the Air Service, and had remained in it ever since.

  “And though the war’s long over, I get homesick for the lark’s land with the German planes playing tunes on their machine guns and their Archies tickling the soles of my feet,” he sighed. “If you’re in love, love to the limit; and if you hate, why hate like the devil and if it’s a fight you’re in, get where it’s hottest and fight like hell—if you don’t life’s not worth the living,” sighed he.

  I watched him as he talked, feeling my liking for him steadily increasing. If I could but have a man like this beside me on the path of unknown peril upon which I had set my feet I thought, wistfully. We sat and smoked a bit, sipping the strong coffee the Portuguese made so well.

  Da Costa at last relieved the Cantonese at the wheel. O’Keefe and I drew chairs up to the rail. The brighter stars shone out dimly through a hazy sky; gleams of phosphorescence tipped the crests of the waves and sparkled with an almost angry brilliance as the bow of the Suwarna tossed them aside. O’Keefe pulled contentedly at a cigarette. The glowing spark lighted the keen, boyish face and the blue eyes, now black and brooding under the spell of the tropic night.

  “Are you American or Irish, O’Keefe?” I asked suddenly.

  “Why?” he laughed.

  “Because,” I answered, “from your name and your service I would suppose you Irish—but your command of pure Americanese makes me doubtful.”

  He grinned amiably.

  “I’ll tell you how that is,” he said. “My
mother was an Americana Grace, of Virginia. My father was the O’Keefe, of Coleraine. And these two loved each other so well that the heart they gave me is half Irish and half American. My father died when I was sixteen. I used to go to the States with my mother every other year for a month or two. But after my father died we used to go to Ireland every other year. And there you are— I’m as much American as I am Irish.

  “When I’m in love, or excited, or dreaming, or mad I have the brogue. But for the everyday purpose of life I like the United States talk, and I know Broadway as well as I do Binevenagh Lane, and the Sound as well as St. Patrick’s Channel; educated a bit at Eton, a bit at Harvard; always too much money to have to make any; in love lots of times, and never a heartache after that wasn’t a pleasant one, and never a real purpose in life until I took the king’s shilling and earned my wings; something over thirty—and that’s me—Larry O’Keefe.”

  “But it was the Irish O’Keefe who sat out there waiting for the banshee,” I laughed.

  “It was that,” he said somberly, and I heard the brogue creep over his voice like velvet and his eyes grew brooding again. “There’s never an O’Keefe for these thousand years that has passed without his warning. An’ twice have I heard the banshee calling—once it was when my younger brother died an’ once when my father lay waiting to be carried out on the ebb tide.”

  He mused a moment, then went on: “An’ once I saw an Annir Choille, a girl of the green people, flit like a shade of green fire through Carntogher woods, an’ once at Dunchraig I slept where the ashes of the Dun of Cormac MacConcobar are mixed with those of Cormac an’ Eilidh the Fair, all burned in the nine flames that sprang from the harping of Cravetheen, an’ I heard the echo of his dead harpings—”

  He paused again and then, softly, with that curiously sweet, high voice that only the Irish seem to have, he sang:

  Woman of the white breasts, Eilidh;

  Woman of the gold-brown hair, and lips of the red, red rowan,

  Where is the swan that is whiter, with breast more soft,