The Best of Argosy #5 - The Monster of the Lagoon

by George Worts

  “Sure!”

  When Bryce Robbins came on deck, she strolled forward with him. The merit was so still Larry could hear the murmur of their voices in the bows. They were there perhaps eight minutes. Then Julie shooed aft. Once again she was pale, her hair was disarrayed, her eyes were wrathful and her lovely mouth was thin. She stopped near his chair.

  “The professor,” she said, in a choking voice, “says I can stay.”

  Larry laughed. “You kissed him into submission.”

  She seated herself on the broad arm of his chair, with her back to him. The night was as hot as the day, but Julie was shivering.

  “How many more people do I have to kiss?”

  “You might give Pegleg a whirl.”

  “All the monsters in all the lagoons in the world aren’t worth it. Put me ashore in Singapore!” Her voice was hysterical. “I’m sick of it! I’m worn out!”

  “Hold it, baby. My sales resistance might be at a low ebb.”

  “Not really!” she said, looking around at him.

  He got up, clapped his hands to her shoulders, lifted her off the chair arm, and brought her hard against his chest. He lowered his face and kissed her.

  Even in the starglow, he could see the wrath in her eyes. But her self-restraint was wonderful.

  “That ought to rate a trip around the world,” she said huskily.

  “You won’t need any more votes.”

  “You don’t mean I can stay?”

  “Hold everything.” He went below. Singapore Sammy was at the desk in his cabin.

  Larry said, “Well, Red, it’s around to you again.”

  “I said she could stay if it was jake with you and Robbins.”

  “When was this?”

  “Right after supper.”

  “So she kissed you out of your horse sense, too!”

  Singapore wriggled his carrot-colored brows. “What is this game — post office?”

  “What does Lucky say?”

  “He has been in a daze since he saw her in those little-bitty white pants. He never knew a girl had legs. Tell her to come down here.”

  Larry went out, leaving the door open. Julie came below promptly and walked in. Her face was flushed, her eyes were brilliant. She looked almost feverish.

  Singapore Sammy closed the door and said, “Sit down, sister. There’s something I think you ought to know.”

  And when she had seated herself on the edge of his bunk, Sammy said: “I want you to answer a blunt question with the truth. Are you in love with Larry McGurk?”

  Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “I’m not in love with anybody.”

  “There’s something you ought to know. I don’t want Larry hurt, and I don’t want a nice kid like you hurt. Did you know that he has about six weeks or a couple of months — at the most — to live?”

  Julie stared at him. The faint smile vanished. She suddenly went white. And she said huskily, “I hope this isn’t a joke.”

  “No. It isn’t a joke. There’s something in his head, some kind of a growth, that is absolutely incurable. A little over four months ago the doctors gave him six months to live. He came out here because he wanted to die in the Far East. And did you hear about the charmed life he leads?”

  “No.” — faintly.

  So Sammy told her about that, too — the sharks and the tiger, the bandits and the cobra. Her eyes were wet.

  Shortly after midnight a breeze sprang up. By morning it was blowing a half-gale. The Blue Goose charged down the Strait of Malacca under double reefs.

  And with Julie accepted as a full-fledged member of that strangely assorted little company, shipboard life settled into a pattern, as shipboard life on a long voyage always does. The bright central figure was Julie, and her shipmates revealed themselves according to their natures.

  Bryce Robbins was so desperately in love that he could hardly eat or sleep. He became more and more irritable and assertive. At every opportunity he made love to Julie, and was indignant when she repulsed him.

  Between him and Lucky Jones a lively hatred had sprung up. Lucky, too, had fallen in love with Julie. He turned so sardonic that his former self was, by comparison, a sunny fellow.

  Pete Cringle fell victim to a species of puppy love. He thought Julie the most wonderful creature in the world — and told her so. She was so kind to him that he became bold and tried to kiss her.

  Only with Singapore Sammy and Laughing Larry did she feel comfortable — and safe. These two treated her as if she were a man. Sam taught her to box the compass and to steer a straight course. But of them all, she seemed to prefer Larry’s companionship. Perhaps it was because he had so short a time to live, perhaps because he seemed so immune to her charms.

  Little else was discussed these days but the monster of the lagoon; how large the creature was, and how dangerous; how much of the legends they had heard was lies and how much was truth: what its nature might prove to be; how they would go about capturing it.

  They agreed — hoped — that it wasn’t large enough, powerful enough to sink a hundred and twenty foot schooner.

  Lucky came out of the chartroom one morning to announce that, if the wind held, they would anchor inside the barrier reef, off the lagoon at Little Nicobar, the following dawn.

  The wind held. Julie Farrington awoke next morning to the rumbling of anchor chain, the flapping of sails, the rattling of blocks, the distant booming of surf on the barrier reef.

  Chapter 9: The Island

  SHE looked out the porthole. Save for bleakly glittering stars and a strange green glow in the distance, the world was still in blackness. The green glow puzzled her, and it made her uneasy. Indefinitely, it was oval in shape — a long, thin oval that seemed to lie mistily on the water about a half-mile away. It plowed and waned and glowed again like an opal or, rather an emerald with an uncertain pale and mystic fire in its heart.

  She heard, in that direction, above the muted thunder of surf on the barrier reef, a low and sustained bubbling.

  The world was growing light. Soon she could see the dark loom of the island against the burnished black metal of rain clouds. The oval wraith faded and she saw the uneasy glimmer of stormlight on the lagoon and the pale glow of the encircling sand arms and the silhouettes of palm trees.

  The Blue Goose had evidently made her anchorage under light airs, for there was no wind now. Glassy water, slowly undulating, stretched from the schooner to the island. The dark mirror of the lagoon was shattered by a million dancing feet.

  She dressed in her ducks, slipped into the sticky yellow slicker Singapore had given her, and went on deck. The men were standing in a group in the stern, looking at the island. As she joined them it vanished behind a brown curtain that seemed to rise out of the water. The squall whipped the sea into racing white.

  Julie went to where Singapore Sammy was standing with binoculars to his eyes, peering at the brownness where the lagoon had been. She glanced at the wet faces of the other men. She was trying not to feel uneasy. Her intelligence said that those old, old legends must be at least, terribly exaggerated; that Pegleg Pyke’s story must have been, in a large part, a product of a sailorman’s imagination.

  A drumlike roll of distant thunder made her jump. She was looking at the lagoon trying to visualize what manner of creature might live in that inkily blue water, and in her imagination she was picturing a hideous, dragon-like monster of green and yellow, with an enormous head about which lappets and tentacles of awful flesh hung. In actuality, mankind’s old conception of a sea serpent.

  Julie asked Sam, in an uneven voice, if he had seen anything. And he nervously answered, “Not yet.”

  “We aren’t going in there?”

  “No.”

  The clouds presently lifted a little, the light grew brighter, and the Dutchman’s house at the edge of the lagoon became visible in its setting of cocoanut palms.

  Sammy studied it through his binoculars and saw a square gray lump of stone. It resembled a tomb, a
very lonely tomb. Until breakfast was ready, he scrutinized the lagoon, raked now and then by showers. He climbed the mainmast ratlines and perched in the cross-tree. Using the glasses, he saw no sign of life in or upon the lagoon. Sea gulls and flamingoes wheeled above it, but he saw none of them light in the water.

  He studied the white coral rim of the lagoon, beginning at the Dutchman’s house and moving his glasses slowly until he had completed the circle. He saw no sign of life except for one large, sluggish crab, and he saw only one entrance to the lagoon — the narrow inlet off which the Blue Goose was anchored.

  At breakfast, Bryce Robbins alone was skeptical. He wanted to take the Blue Goose into the lagoon under power and explore.

  Pegleg Pyke said harshly, “Only a fool sets sail for a place where an angel wouldn’t dast show a keel.”

  “Oh, there’s no danger,” the scientist irritably answered. “It’s all in your imaginations.”

  “That tribe o’ head-hunters ain’t in our imaginations,” the one-legged old sailor retorted.

  Sammy cried, “Oh, pipe down. We’re on each other’s nerves. We aren’t going into the lagoon. We will send a party ashore in the small boat and the shore party will take pistols and cutlasses. Pegleg has been here before and will take charge. Who do you want?”

  Pegleg looked about the table. He passed Julie’s pale, hopeful young face. His glance lingered on the freckled, pug-nosed face of Pete Cringle. “The best deep-sea diver on the Indian Ocean.” He glanced at Bryce Robbins, at Larry, at Lucky and back to Sammy.

  “I’ll take you, Lucky and Larry.”

  “And me,” Julie muttered.

  “I’m going, of course,” Professor Robbins said firmly. He looked as if he was prepared to add that it was his right, inasmuch as he was underwriting the expedition.

  He had said this in settling several other disputes.

  Sammy said hastily, “Of course, Bryce.”

  Singapore went on deck and instructed Senga, the serang, to put the small boat over. He went to his cabin for his automatic pistol. When he returned, a lively argument was taking place between Pegleg, on deck, and Julie, who sat in the stern of the small boat alongside and refused to move.

  Julie was saying, “I defy anyone to put me off this boat.”

  When the boat started for the beach, it contained Larry, Pegleg Pyke, Professor Robbins, Lucky, Sam and Julie. Larry took the oars and drove the boat toward a landing place on the beach near a grove of cocoanut palms.

  Julie, in the bows, stared at the island through the drizzling rain. Her heart was thumping. At each surge of the bows her excitement grew.

  She wasn’t using her imagination. There was something in the air that frightened her.

  The keel grated on the sand. She leaped out, stared through the palms at the white sand dune beyond which was the lagoon and Gurt Vandernoot’s old stone cabin. She expected to see something appear at the top of the dune. She tried not to feel so frightened but her heart was beating against the wall of her chest, and she was as white as a ghost.

  She waited for the others to land. She was glad she was so well armed. There had been a moment when it had seemed a trifle ridiculous to be holding a cutlass in one hand, a pistol in the other. But it didn’t seem ridiculous now. It seemed eminently sensible.

  Even Bryce Robbins, the scoffer, pale and watchful-eyed, carried his cutlass and pistol ashore, although he had said, leaving the ship, that such precautions were fantastic and childish.

  And she observed that Larry McGurk who took nothing seriously, was pale and that a tightness had settled about his mouth.

  Sam and the scowling Lucky were grim and watchful. They had spent many years in these islands and they had the look of men prepared for any kind of treachery or trouble.

  The clouds had lifted a little, and the base of the black mountain in the middle of the island could be seen mistily. Julie glanced at the mountain, but her eyes were snatched back to the shimmering surface of the lagoon below her. Her eyes roved about, darted here and there over the water. Shivering, she stared at the little gray block of stone near the edge of the lagoon, where Gurt Vandernoot had mysteriously lived and mysteriously died. She wondered what his end had been.

  Pegleg Pyke was brandishing his cutlass. “From the base o’ that there mountain and right down through there is where I run that night — twenty years ago! Right down there past that little stone house I run. The island’s sunk fifteen foot since then. There was palms growin’ close to the water then. They’re gone now. It was one o’ them palms I grabbed when the thing grabbed me.”

  Julie shuddered but said nothing. If she said she was afraid, if she said anything, they would make her wait in the boat.

  Sam said, “I suppose it’s safe enough to go down there.”

  “Safe enough in the daytime,” Pegleg said.

  “How about these natives?” Lucky asked.

  “Just keep clear o’ the trees.”

  Bryce Robbins made a sound of impatience in his nose and started briskly down the slope toward the lagoon. He called back, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You can see there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  They followed Pegleg and Bryce down the slope to the Dutchman’s house, but Julie kept wary eyes on the lagoon. She wasn’t afraid of the natives, but the lagoon, in its blue innocence, frightened her as nothing had in all her life.

  The Dutchman’s house was no farther than twenty feet from the water’s edge. It had been built of slabs of coral rock neatly fitted together and it had the look of a structure that would last forever. Shaped like a paving block, it was about twenty feet long by fifteen wide.

  On the lagoon side, about five feet from the ground, was a row of eight equally-spaced five-inch loopholes. Julie caught the glint of light on them and saw that they were not loopholes but peepholes covered with thick glass.

  A whirring sound behind her made her spin about with a cry which she quickly stifled. But it was only the sound of flamingoes circling out over the lagoon from the jungle.

  Bryce Robbins said impatiently, “You people act as if you expect to see a ghost. Let’s have a look inside.” But his voice was none too sure.

  They went around to the rear of the stone cabin, where the door was. It was open. It was a narrow door of iron or steel an inch thick, hung on hinges like those of a bank vault.

  It was caked with rust. There was a heavy bolt on the inner side, and there was a steel socket set into the masonry to accommodate this bolt.

  Singapore said, “Someone had better stand guard.”

  Lucky said, “Watch out for snakes. It’s blacker in there than the heart of hell.”

  Julie was staring into the darkness, wondering about the mysterious man who had lived here so many years.

  Larry said, “That roof was built to last, too.” It was reinforced concrete, constructed by laying small iron pipe crosswise in layers, then flowing on cement. Successive layers of pipes and cement made a roof eighteen inches thick.

  The cabin doorway exhaled a breath of dampness and mold — the characteristic smell of poorly ventilated stone houses in the tropics.

  Singapore flashed on an electric torch. Julie saw a floor littered with rubbish. She saw dust, mold, fungus, spiders, crabs, and scorpions. Large nameless shiny insects scurried to cover. Presumably this cabin was, except for the ravages of time, just as it had been twenty-six years ago when Gurt Vandernoot died in it or abandoned it.

  Sammy said, “There’s two rooms. There’s a stone wall down the middle, dividing: the cabin. And there’s another iron door.”

  Sammy, Bryce Robbins, Pegleg and Lucky went inside. When they announced that there were no snakes, Julie followed them. Larry remained outside to keep an eye on the lagoon and the jungle.

  The door in the stone wall was closed. About five feet from the bottom was a round hole, probably a peephole, three inches in diameter. Below it, near an edge, was a large keyhole.

  Sam put one eye to the peephole, but saw no
thing. He put his fingers into the hole and tried to pull the door open. He said, “It’s locked. When Vandernoot left, he locked that room.”

  Lucky growled, “We gotta see what’s in that room. How do you know the Dutchman’s skeleton ain’t in that room? I’m goin’ back to the ship for the acetylene torch.”

  When he was gone, Julie said, “How did Vandernoot build this house? He dared work only by daylight. Where did he go at night?”

  “He may have had a ship,” Bryce guessed.

  “Or slept in a tree,” Singapore said.

  “Why he wanted to live here at all,” the scientist murmured, “is a mystery.”

  “Pearls ain’t a mystery,” Pegleg said.

  They explored the room. They found fragments of books printed in Dutch. They found the spot against the wall where a bookcase had stood. Termites had destroyed all wooden furniture and woodwork.

  “This room,” Bryce Robbins said, “was undoubtedly his living room and kitchen. That pile of rust was doubtless his cookstove. I presume he lived in this room and slept in the front room.”

  “At night,” Julie said, “he would go in there and lock himself in. Walls a yard thick, that roof and this steel door kept the thing out — if it tried to get him. The thing may have caught him unexpectedly. It may have fooled him and come out in the daytime!”

  She started to shiver and called, “Larry, are you all right?”

  His voice answered, “Everything’s okay. It’s going to stop raining.”

  They investigated the room until Lucky returned with the oxyacetylene blowtorch and set to work cutting through the steel door. It took him more than an hour to cut around the massive lock which was riveted inside the steel slab.

  He said presently, “Here she goes.” With a mechanic’s hammer he dealt a sharp blow to the semicircle of steel he had cut with the torch. The steel half-disc fell inward.

  He pulled the door open.

  The five of them crowded about the narrow doorway and stared into the darkness of the front room. The floor was littered with rubbish. Against one wall were the remains of an iron single bed. The mattress was nothing more than shredded fragments. The legs were columns of red rust.