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

by George Worts

  There was no skeleton.

  Pegleg panted: “It got him! I knew it got him! He was careless. He went outside when he should ‘a’ been locked up in here — and it got him!”

  Bryce said irritably, “He may have died a thousand miles from here.”

  “No, he didn’t. He got careless. He was here fifteen years. I’ve heard tell he was a friend o’ the monster’s. Mebbe he was and mebbe he wasn’t. But it got him in the end.”

  The one-legged old sailor was puffing with excitement. His voice was shrill. “Sam,” he shrilled, “I’m goin’ to spend the night in this room!”

  Chapter 10: Pegleg’s Plan

  JULIE uttered a shriek. Sammy growled, “Don’t be foolish, Pegleg.”

  “Foolish?” the old sailor panted. “It’s what I’ve wanted to do for the past twenty years — see the thing with my own eyes! I’ll do what Vandernoot did. I’ll lock myself in this room. I’ll clean off them peepholes. There’s a moon tonight. Here I stay!”

  Lucky entered the argument. He declared it was damned foolishness.

  “You boys don’t understand,” Pegleg pleaded. “How would you feel if year after year you wondered what kind of a critter it was mashed your leg off? What if it’s foolish? Call me anything — but here I stay tonight!”

  “The lock’s gone,” Sam said.

  “Lucky can fix another.”

  “No.”

  “Fiery hell,” Pegleg cried, “ain’t I the only man in the world who met the thing face to face — and lived to tell it? Ain’t it my right to have first look at it? And it won’t be risky. Because you’re gonna lock me in!”

  “Oh, Pegleg,” Julie groaned.

  “Weld it up,” he shouted, “and put a padlock on the outside. There’s a good big padlock in the paint locker. I want to be locked in, and I don’t want to be let out till tomorrow mornin’.”

  “Why?” Sammy growled.

  “‘Cause I’m scairt o’ myself. I don’t trust meself. I might give in to temptation and rush out and give battle to it. Once I see it, I might go daffy. So lock me in. I’ll bring ashore a cot, drinking water, rations and rum.”

  “What makes you think you’ll see it?” Julie asked.

  “Don’t it come out o’ the lagoon every night?”

  “Does it?”

  Julie gave a hysterical laugh, and Lucky jeered:

  “Maybe the professor would like to stay with you.”

  “I don’t want comp’ny.”

  “We won’t quarrel,” Bryce said. “My only request is that you don’t kill it.”

  “I promise you I won’t kill it!”

  “Then your proposal is satisfactory to me.”

  But Sammy was reluctant to give his consent. He wanted to size things up first. He went outside. Larry was walking along the beach, shading his eyes against the glare of the clouds, and looking into the water. Sammy asked him if he’d found the cave.

  “I think so. But these cloud shadows fool you.”

  What he believed was the cave was a patch of darkness a dozen feet under water. The beach here was not sand but a solid formation of white coral.

  Sam found rocks and threw them in the water. The shadow did not move or change.

  Lucky joined them. He studied the shadow and said it looked like a cave to him.

  Julie coming out of the cabin with Pegleg saw the three men standing at the edge of the lagoon. She cried hysterically, “Come away from there!”

  Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. Angrily, she got rid of them. Her nerves, she discovered were in tatters.

  Once again aboard, the discussion continued. And Pegleg Pyke remained belligerently determined to spend the night in the Dutchman’s cabin.

  At tiffin, Bryce Robbins settled the argument by saying: “Pegleg’s findings may be exceedingly useful. We must know what this creature is like. If you talk him out of it, I will spend the night there myself.”

  Pegleg Pyke grinned his evil, gold-fanged grin. He assembled supplies and equipment. He loaded and tested one of the submachine rifles. He stowed a cot, bedding, candles, a jug of water, a bottle of rum, tobacco, a cutlass and the submachine gun in the small boat. Sam and Larry went ashore with him.

  When the three men reached the stone house. Lucky repaired the door and welded a strong steel ring to the plate that replaced the old lock. He set another ring into the masonry, so that the door could be held shut with the padlock.

  Pegleg cleared a space for his cot and placed a grocery box beside it. On the box he arranged the bottle of rum, the submachine gun and an old gin bottle with a candle in the neck.

  It was late afternoon when the door was finished. Pegleg was ready to be locked in for the night.

  “If you hear me yell,” he said, “don’t worry. When I clap eyes on the thing: if it’s as horrible as I think, I may git scairt and yell blue murder. But don’t pay no attention. Don’t come ashore.”

  “You’ll probably be a ravin’ lunatic in the mornin’,” Lucky said.

  “Don’t you worry, son,” he cackled, and flashed his gold-capped fangs. “I’ll be here and, with luck, I’ll be tellin’ you how it looks. I was never so doggoned excited in all my life. It’s like havin’ the curtain pulled back and lookin’ into the hereafter. Sure you lads ain’t jealous?”

  Larry grinned and said, “Remember to keep your head on, old timer. No matter what it is, remember you’re safe. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  Lucky closed and padlocked the steel door on the old sailor, and the two men returned to the schooner. Julie climbed down from the cross-tree and Sammy took her place. He was uneasy about the natives, he told her. According to all accounts, the Little Nicobar tribe had never been civilized. And there was the rumor of a white chieftain. White chieftains were, as a rule, not to be trusted. But he saw no sign of natives.

  He climbed down the ratlines and joined the group under the afterdeck awning. They were watching the island with the air of people enchanted. It was actually as if that dark and brooding mass was possessed of an ominous, sinister presence which filled the night with the effluvia of menace.

  At midnight, Julie tiptoed down the stairs to her room. Lucky, Larry, Bryce and Pete Cringle turned in a little later.

  Singapore remained on deck. Near him, in the stern, Senga stood guard with a submachine rifle. Oangi was on lookout forward.

  Stretched out in the lazy man’s chair, Sammy must have dozed. Senga’s brown hand on his shoulder brought him to alertness.

  Far away in the night, Sammy heard a dull, slow booming. It was not the surf. It seemed to come from the mountain. He saw, or fancied he saw, a faint, deep-red glow in that direction. It might have been a fire. It might have been the reflection of the moon on a porphyry cliff. The reverberations, low and distant, might have been those of a drum.

  A shrill sound wrenched Sammy from sleep. He sprang from the chair and grasped the taffrail, staring dazedly at the dark mass of Little Nicobar.

  Far away, a man was screaming. Muffled as it was, and dimmed by distance, the sound came clear and throbbing. The blood-chilling screams emanated, there was little doubt, from the stone cabin.

  Chapter 11: Vanished

  FEET hammered on the stairs. Larry and Lucky came plunging up. Lucky gasped: “What the hell is it?” Julie appeared, struggling into a dressing gown, crying, “What’s happening?” Pete Cringle came running from the fo’c’s’le.

  Sam ran forward to the mainmast rigging and began to climb. At the cross-trees he braced his legs and stared out over the dark water. The moon was gone. The reflections of stars slid over undulations like darting silver knives. The sinister sweetness of the giant orchids perfumed the warm night. The mist-shrouded lagoon glowed and shimmered. He could see the row of lighted peepholes in the stone cabin. Suddenly came the rapid, stuttering fire of the sub-machine gun. Perhaps a dozen shots were fired. There was a bar of silence, ripped by another awful scream. There were no more shots.

  Sam’s legs were tre
mbling so that the shrouds and ratlines shook. The row of peepholes suddenly went dark and he groaned. The screams were shorter and fainter, as if they were wrenched from a man in mortal terror.

  Sammy descended the ratlines and walked to the group huddled on the afterdeck. A bitter argument was in progress. Pete Cringle was determined to go ashore at once. If they didn’t let him have a boat, he’d swim.

  Lucky said, “Nobody leaves this ship till sun-up.”

  In frantic wrath, the boy rushed at him. Lucky struck him in the jaw with his fist and Pete Cringle fell to hands and knees, whimpering curses.

  Sam panted: “Lucky, could anything happen? Doesn’t that door open out? All the pressure there is couldn’t smash that door in on him, could it? He’s safe. He must be safe. He saw it and got scared. That’s all.”

  In a shivering little voice the girl said, “What could it be to make any man scream so — just the sight of it?”

  Bryce Robbins made that familiar sound of exasperation with his nose. “Bosh. You’re forgetting the old fellow has been in a pathologic state of mind. He would have screamed at anything.”

  Sammy shook his head. “Why did he shoot that gun?”

  “Nerves!”

  Lucky growled, “Oh, you know so damned much!”

  “Who heard that strange booming sound earlier?” Julie asked.

  They compared notes. Pete Cringle picked himself up from the deck and muttered that he had heard it, too. He had also heard a queer swishing sound after Pegleg had stopped screaming. It had sounded like monstrous wings.

  Bryce said peevishly, “Oh, that’s absurd. I was listening and I heard nothing but the mud vats and the reef.”

  Bryce Robbins took no stock in mythological monsters, mysterious creatures with wings, sea serpents, dragons, with any beast, in fact, that did not knuckle down to natural laws. He declared they would find Pegleg sound of limb and mind — and it would be thrilling to listen to his account of a stirring experience.

  Bryce swayed no one. The discussion raged until a steely glow appeared on the eastern horizon. The glow brightened until the sky was filled with a cool, clean, colorless radiance, then blazed with the purple and gold of tropical sunrise.

  At a conference from which Julie was absent, it was decided that Sam, Lucky and Bryce Robbins would slip ashore, leaving Larry aboard to guard Julie. The scientist was not afraid of what he might find at the stone cabin, but the others were. After those screams, the least they expected was a madman.

  While Julie and Larry were forward, the three men left in the small boat. Julie yelled in protest, but the small boat, with Lucky at the oars, drove on toward the beach. When they neared their yesterday’s landing place, Singapore Sammy did not wait for the keel to scrape sand, but leaped out and splashed through shallow water to the beach and ran up and over the dune.

  Springing down the other side, he shouted, “Pegleg!” And when no answering shout came, he shouted wrathfully, “Pegleg! Answer me!”

  But Pegleg did not answer. And as Sammy ran on to the cabin, he saw great grooves in the sand, running from the edge of the lagoon to the shrubbery which formed a thick undergrowth about the cabin, as if heavy objects had been dragged there.

  Panting, he stopped and stared at them. They were wide swaths in the sand, perhaps a dozen in number, and of varying depths and widths, some a foot wide, others as wide as a yard, and some were shallow while others were perhaps a foot deep. He saw that all of them were coated with a drying, colorless slime. And he saw that some of the bushes nearest the cabin had been crushed, as if some massive creature had crawled over them. Leaves and twigs of these crushed bushes were dripping with slime.

  In sudden panic, the red-headed man wheeled about and stared at the lagoon, but its smooth blue innocence was unruffled by so much as a light breeze. He saw no strange shadows or shapes.

  But he backed away from it with loathing and trepidation until his groping hand found the corner of the cabin. Breathing loudly, he ran around to the back and to the doorway. When he saw that the inner steel door was still shut and that the padlock was still in place, he gave a groan of relief and panted, “Pegleg, wake up, old fellow! We’re here!”

  He ran to the outer door and saw Lucky and the scientist floundering toward him through the soft sand. He yelled, “Hurry up with that key!”

  And Lucky shouted, “How is he?”

  “He won’t answer!”

  Sammy became aware simultaneously of two sensations, the one localized and sharp, the other quite as definite but nameless. One was fear of unseen, lurking peril, the other was a stinging in the palm of his hand. It was the palm he had pressed against the steel door. He looked swiftly from his palm to the door, hissing curses. His palm was flushed an angry red. The steel door was wet. This wetness formed a triangle from the bottom to the keyhole, as if the nameless thing which had left those swaths in the sand had pressed a flank or some other portion of its slimy anatomy against that area. And Sammy saw that this wet area was gently fizzing, as metal fizzes when diluted acid is poured on it.

  He wiped his hand frantically, with repugnance, on his pants leg. Bryce Robbins, plunging ahead of Lucky had reached the grooves in the sand. He dropped to his knees beside them.

  Sammy roared: “Watch out for that slime! It’ll rot your hide!” Lucky had the key in his right hand. He was grasping the padlock with the left, but his hands shook so violently that he could not at first insert key into lock. When he had unlocked it, he seized the iron ring on the door and gave a wrench and heave.

  The heavy door swung open. Sammy had a bundle of matches in his hand. He scrubbed the heads down the masonry and held the small torch aloft.

  Shoulder to shoulder, the two men entered the room. Pegleg Pyke was not there.

  Chapter 12: Where Is Pegleg?

  WITH the flame over his head, Sammy sent glances about the empty room. He took in the ceiling and the walls. They were intact.

  His brain thought it out before the realization hit home. He said, methodically: “He could not have got out. That door was padlocked on the outside. He could not have got out through walls or floor or ceiling. He could not possibly get out of this room.” Then he hoarsely cried: “Good God!”

  The man beside him made a metallic sound in his throat. He beat at the air with his hands, with fingers distended like claws. He turned about and, with that strange rattling sound, ran out of the cabin.

  The red-haired man dropped the matches, spun about and sped after him. Through the watery blur of panic, he saw Lucky running, floundering, through the sand toward the top of the dune.

  Bryce Robbins shouted: “What is it?”

  And Sam yelled: “Get out of here!”

  He followed Lucky Jones through the sand, over the dune and to the small boat with the scientist legging it after him and hoarsely shouting questions. Bryce dashed through the water and climbed into the boat as the bows started to swing. The two men, each with an oar, were poling it away from the land with the desperate strength of insane men. Their eyes were glassy with panic, and their color was that of fresh clay.

  Bryce said harshly, “Is Pegleg dead?”

  Lucky, in a voice thinned by fury and terror, answered, “Oh, God, is he dead?”

  “What was it?”

  Sam answered: “He’s gone!”

  “Out of that locked room?”

  “Sure!” Sammy panted.

  “Oh, that’s impossible!”

  “Oh, hell!” Lucky veiled. “Don’t start an argument or I’ll murder you!”

  Furiously, Bryce shouted: “I’m going to find out what happened!” — Sam dropped down to a thwart and fitted an oar to an oarlock.

  “He wasn’t there,” he gasped. “He was gone.”

  “And that door was locked?”

  “That door was locked,” Lucky panted. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t locked. I locked it myself last night and I had the only key!”

  “Nothing was broken in?”

  “No!�
��

  The scientist stared from one sweating, yellow face to the other.

  “You — you looked thoroughly?”

  “He wasn’t in that room,” Lucky said.

  Bryce looked at him with hatred and tightened his lips.

  “I’m naturally curious to know just what happened. A man was locked in that cabin last night, behind a steel door, in a room with three-foot stone walls and an eighteen-inch reinforced concrete roof. In short, it was physically impossible for him to get out of that room. Yet you say he did. What you’re saying is beyond the bounds of wildest fantasy.”

  Shouts were reaching them now from the schooner. Larry, Julie and Pete Cringle were on the afterdeck yelling questions.

  Sam shouted in answer: “Wait till we get aboard. Pegleg’s gone! He’s vanished!”

  Julie made a little whimpering sound, “Sam, what happened?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and wiped his forehead.

  “You couldn’t have looked thoroughly!”

  “We both looked. I lit a bundle of matches and we took a good look. If I’d been alone, I’d think I was nuts. But we both saw the room. There was no one in it!”

  “Oh, how could he be gone!”

  Julie dropped into a chair with a sick little moan. The three men came aboard. They looked confused and ill. Even the scientist was pale.

  Larry drawled, “Was there anything else unusual?”

  “Tracks,” Lucky growled. “That thing came up out o’ the lagoon durin’ the night.”

  “What was it?” Julie gasped.

  “We don’t know anything,” Bryce answered.

  Lucky gave a jeering laugh. “Say it again, mister!”

  Bryce flashed a look of hatred at him.

  “They weren’t tracks,” he said, “in the usual sense. They were deep grooves, about ten of them, running from the water to the cabin. They were coated with slime.”