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

by George Worts

  “That slime is full of acid,” Singapore said. And he showed Julie his hand. It was inflamed and beginning to blister on the heel. “The door was wet with that stuff.”

  Julie shivered. “Soak it in antiseptic, Sam. Bryce, do you know what it is?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got a pocketful of the sand. I want to analyze it.”

  Larry had gone below. He returned with a bottle of trade gin. He and Sammy each took generous swigs from the bottle, then Sammy went to the ladder and said: “Come on, fella. Back we go! We’re going to get to the bottom of this!”

  “Yeah?” Lucky said. “I’ve had enough for one mornin’. Take Larry along. This is a fine chance for a guy who can’t get killed. But he won’t grab this tiger by the chin whiskers!”

  The two men went down the ladder. Larry cast off and picked up the oars. As they started off, Lucky called: “I’ll post a lookout. If he fires two shots — run!”

  “Okay.”

  Reaching shore, the two young men proceeded cautiously over the dune and to the cabin. Larry had brought along a pocket electric torch.

  Sam said, as they entered the cabin: “We’re going over this joint with a fine-tooth comb. When you come right down to it, there’s nothing to be scared about.”

  “Nothing,” Larry said.

  “It makes my skin creep, but we’re going to make two and two come out even. Now, look. Pegleg couldn’t have got out through the walls or the roof or the floor. All we have to do is use our noodles. How did he get out?”

  Larry gasped: “Good Lord! Did you see that cot?”

  The cot was crushed — flattened to the floor. The grocery box was crushed into splinters. The gin and rum bottles were in fragments.

  “He put up an awful fight.”

  Sam gasped: “Throw your light into that corner!”

  Larry swung the beam into the corner and gave a sharp grunt.

  In the corner was Pegleg Pyke’s wooden leg.

  Sam said, “Don’t touch anything. Everything is covered with that slime. And here’s a tough one. The straps are not unbuckled!”

  “It was ripped off!”

  “These straps are badly eaten, and the buckles are corroded as if they’d been in salt water for years. It’s that stuff. Watch out for it.”

  The wooden leg was the first of several shocking but unedifying discoveries. The next was Pegleg’s old silver watch. It had stopped at 2:24, the time at which they had heard the old man scream. The crystal was smashed and the case was green with corrosion.

  Sam bent down to examine the sub-machine gun, which lay on the floor near the crushed cot.

  He gave a sharper grunt. “The barrel’s bent! Something grabbed it and bent it! Do you know how much strength it takes to bend that kind of steel?”

  “What could have bent it?”

  “Fifteen shots were fired.”

  “At what?”

  “Let’s see where they went.”

  They examined the door for bullet marks. On the inner side, near the peephole, they found five. They kicked about in the litter and found a number of bullets. Several were flattened and gouged, as if they had struck the door or the wall, and ricocheted. But others were only slightly mushroomed, as if they had expended their force in softer substance — flesh of some kind.

  “But what kind of flesh?” Larry asked.

  “Ghosts don’t stop bullets.”

  “Can’t you make a guess?”

  “Teeth!” Sam exclaimed.

  They lay in a small group, six of them, each within a few inches of the other. Each was gold-capped.

  Squatting down, Sam looked up at the man who couldn’t be killed. “Any questions about them?”

  “No! They’re Pegleg’s!”

  They looked further. They found fragments of shoes, badly eaten and covered with slime. They found rotting fragments of cloth. They found another collection of teeth and another watch.

  Sam cried: “These aren’t Pegleg’s!”

  The watch was thick, of gold, with the name Van Huyt, Amsterdam, on the dial and the initials G.V. engraved on the back.

  “Gurt Vandernoot! He died in this room, too!”

  Sam said, unsteadily, “Now let’s try to be reasonable. Let’s use our heads. So far we haven’t found anything that doesn’t make some kind of sense.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “We haven’t!” Sam declared. “Let’s keep on using our heads.”

  “Okay. Two men were locked in this room, one of them twenty-six years ago, the other last night. Both disappear. Nothing is left but teeth and watches — and a wooden leg. Whoever or whatever got them could not get into — or out of — this room. So what?”

  “The peephole,” Sam said in a stronger voice. “That’s it! Of course that’s it! Look here!” He played the flashlight beam on the inner side of the door. “It’s wet and slimy in a triangular pattern, the same as on the other side!”

  Larry shouted: “My God! It crawled through that hole!”

  Chapter 13: Wild Theories

  IN THE light from the outer door, each stared into the other’s pale face. “A sea-snake!” Larry cried. “It crawled through that hole last night and ate Pegleg!”

  Sam looked at him with half-open eyes, then he looked at the peephole.

  “How could a sea-snake crawl through that hole, eat a man — and crawl out again? No snake digests food so quickly. I’ve seen a python eat a pig. It took days for the lump to go down. And how about those tracks in the sand?”

  “It could have been —” Larry stopped. “Listen!” he whispered.

  Sam heard the shot faintly, rounded, like the thump of a hand on a leather cushion. They heard a second shot.

  Larry ran out. Sam unfolded a handkerchief and scooped into it the teeth, the watches and several of the bullets. When he went out, Larry was facing the lagoon with hands outstretched rigidly.

  “What is it?”

  He growled, “I don’t know! Why did they fire those shots?”

  Sam scanned the lagoon, which was innocently blue and calm, then the edge of the jungle. There was no breath of wind. The equatorial sun beat down in a vibrant, merciless glare.

  The red-headed man saw no motion, no life, but he said, “Let’s go.” And they walked rapidly back to the small boat. Sam pushed it out, jumped in and rowed vigorously until they were well offshore.

  Julie called through a megaphone: “You were gone so long we got worried.”

  Bryce Robbins came above as Sam and the mate climbed the accommodation ladder. He said eagerly, “Find anything?”

  “Plenty. It got in that peephole, it got Pegleg, and it got out the same way.”

  “That’s incredible!”

  Pale-lipped, Larry said, “It was a seasnake, Bryce. It had to be.”

  Lucky Jones was stretched out under the awning, with his eyes closed and an empty trade gin bottle in the curl of his fingers.

  When Sam started describing what they had found, Lucky rolled over and peered at the grisly souvenirs spread out on the handkerchief. He nodded sagely and said: “Sure. It had to be an eel.”

  The scientist shook his head. “I don’t see an eel going through a three-inch hole, eating a man and getting out, in spite of the fastest digestion probably ever known to science.”

  “I see an eel,” Lucky said obstinately. Sam asked Bryce if he had analyzed the slime.

  “That’s what I was talking about. I don’t know what it is. It might be an external secretion, but that seems unlikely. It is probably a digestive fluid. But none of my reagents are any good for it. It’s a rare acid, with some of the characteristics of hydrochloric, which is the basis of most digestive processes. Yet it isn’t hydrochloric. Whatever it is, it’s a powerful solvent. It would dissolve — or digest — almost any ordinary substance. We’ve seen how it attacks leather and metal — and human flesh.”

  “I see an electric eel,” Captain Jones stated.

  The scientist tightened his lips. He, too,
was colorless and tense. “I’m inclined to suspect an octopus. It must answer to natural laws.” He glanced coldly at Lucky, but Lucky was staring stonily at the handkerchief. “Doesn’t the octopus secrete a fluid with which it stains the water when it attacks?”

  “How,” Julie asked tremulously, “could an octopus get their skulls through such a small hole?”

  “Easily! A tentacle of a large octopus is strong enough to crush a man’s skull into fragments, and no eel could have made those tracks.”

  Pete Cringle mumbled an objection. “I’ve done a lot o’ divin’ in these waters and I never seen an octopus that could stick an arm far into a three-inch hole.”

  “It may be a rare variety.”

  “I’ve seen all the varieties there are. And I never seen a land-going variety.”

  “Neither have I,” Lucky grunted.

  “Why do you keep thinkin’ of octopuses and eels?” the diver persisted. “What if it ain’t either: What if it’s somethin’ you never saw and never thought of? What if it’s some kind o’ dragon that makes itself invisible or somethin’? How do you know?”

  “It wasn’t an octopus,” Sammy said. “It was something worse than any octopus. The black stuff an octopus shoots out isn’t acid. It’s coloring matter.”

  The scientist looked displeased. “What do you think it is?”

  “I’d hate to say. It’s got me up a tree, Bryce. I’ve sailed among these islands going on seven years. I’ve run into queer riddles, but never one like this. Tell me: If that acid’s strong enough to eat my hide, why doesn’t it eat the thing itself?”

  Bryce Robbins smiled thinly. “Why doesn’t a cobra’s venom kill the cobra? Why don’t your own digestive juices digest you? This octopus merely ejects acidulous fluid as a process of digestion.”

  “Was it,” Lucky sneered, “trying to digest that door?”

  The scientist scorned his question. In his crisp, cool, irritating voice, he said, “I’d like to have a definite understanding. I know how all of you feel about Pegleg. You’d like to avenge his death by killing this octopus. Undoubtedly, one or all of us will in due course have opportunities to destroy it. I insist that you restrain yourselves. It must be taken alive.”

  A shout from Senga, perched on the crosstree, was so startling that they all jumped. He had seen a ship.

  Julie ran to the rail, that bulwark of steel bayonets.

  At first she saw nothing in that direction but the barrier reef, then she made out a fleck of white far in the distance where the blue became purple.

  Sammy, beside her, was adjusting his binoculars. He looked through them steadily for a long time, then grunted.

  “It’s a yacht — a white one.”

  “Not the Wanderer,” Julie moaned. “Oh, not the Wanderer, Sam!”

  “It looks like her.”

  “Let me see.”

  He gave her the glasses, but she was too jumpy to hold them steady. She saw nothing but a white blur that danced about on the deep blue field.

  Singapore said, “She had two exhaust stacks, didn’t she?”

  Julie began to cry. She knew she was on the very brink of hysterics, for she wanted to cry and she wanted to laugh, too.

  Chapter 14: Julie Decides

  THE Wanderer, at far range, was a ship carved of alabaster upon a sea of kingfisher jade. She cleaved through the water toward the barrier reef at a speed of not less than thirty knots, the snow-white hull and the buff exhaust stacks smartly delineated against the vivid, intense blue of the sea with its purple distances.

  Those aboard the Blue Goose could see the crew lined along the deck rail, and they could see a small group on the bridge, men in snowy white and a plump woman in pink, with glasses to her eyes.

  A red megaphone appeared in the hands of one of the men in white; a short, chunky one. A high-pitched voice hurtled across the gap.

  “Julie, are you all right?”

  She tried to answer, but her voice refused. She nodded.

  Larry shouted: “She’s fine!”

  “Those guys,” Lucky muttered, “Have all got guns. What is this — a hold-up?”

  The megaphone changed hands. A woman’s hysterical voice called: “Julie, are you quite all right?”

  Unable to speak, Julie bobbed her head.

  “She says,” Larry shouted, “she never felt better in her life.”

  A consultation was taking place on the Wanderer’s Bridge. The megaphone appeared again, and a deep, strong voice called: “Mr. Barling and Mrs. Farrington are going over for Miss Farrington. I want to warn you men I have guns trained on you.”

  “That’s Captain Milikin.” Julie whispered. “He’s really awfully nice.”

  Larry said, “He sounds like a hospitable soul.”

  “Hector told him to say that. Listen, Larry — Sam — Lucky — Bryce. You’re going to back me up, aren’t you?”

  “It looks like a tough spot, baby,” Singapore said.

  “Why?” She seized Sam’s arm. “You’ll stand by me, Sam!”

  He shrugged. “I hate to see a member of my crew desert in a foreign port, but I think you’d better get packed.”

  She made a little squeaking sound. Sam saw tears coursing down her cheeks.

  Julie didn’t leave the rail. She stopped weeping and watched them put over the little tender. Two members of the crew followed. The engine purred. With a smart little flourish the tender started toward the Blue Goose.

  Sam studied Mr. Barling in the stern: a plump, important figure in a snowy sun helmet; a man with a pink, round face adorned with a wisp of blond mustache.

  The tender swung neatly alongside the schooner’s accommodation ladder platform. Mr. Barling looked up at the row of faces above the steel bayonets. He looked wrathful. Fixing his pale blue eyes at Julie, he said sternly, “Julie, are you coming?”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought so!” Mr. Barling snapped.

  Sam said lazily, “What did you think, Mister?”

  Mr. Barling glared at him a moment, then said to the plump woman in pink. “We are going aboard. You men will follow.”

  “Yes, sir,” the two men said.

  Mr. Barling helped Mrs. Farrington up to the platform, and aided her up the steps to the afterdeck. The two men, looking uneasy, with black holsters at their hips followed.

  With a whimpering sound, Mrs. Farrington went to Julie and, sobbing loudly, embraced her.

  “Poor mother!” Julie murmured. “I’m horribly sorry you worried so.”

  “Who is the master of this ship?” Mr. Barling barked.

  “I’m the skipper,” Lucky drawled.

  “I demand the instant release of this young woman!”

  Captain Jones’ thick black brows bent down and his breath whistled out of his nostrils. But before he could speak, the owner of the Wanderer said in the same stern measures, “If you do not release her instantly, I will have you in the nearest admiralty court!”

  “Yeah?” Lucky’s mouth seemed to be pushed to one side. “Are you an admiral?”

  Julie giggled nervously. She was still on the brink of hysterics, but she tried to make her voice calm. “Hector, I’m not a prisoner. These men are my friends.”

  “You mean you’re afraid to tell the truth! I am not. This gang of cutthroats will learn that kidnapping is a serious offense!”

  “But I wasn’t kidnapped. Mother —”

  “Oh, Julie, my poor darling, how could you!”

  “Pack your things!” Mr. Barling snapped.

  “I am not leaving this schooner!”

  “I’ll have every man on this dirty little tub clapped in irons!”

  “What have we done?” Sam asked lazily.

  “You’re guilty of abduction!”

  Lucky bared his large white teeth and with a rolling gait approached the patent medicine king. “You use another word like that in the presence of this lady, and I’ll knock your teeth out through the soles of your feet!”

 
; “You men,” Mr. Barling panted, “keep this fellow covered!”

  Lucky looked at the bodyguard, “You guys pull a gun on this ship and you’ll be crab-food!”

  “Hector,” Mrs. Farrington implored, “talk to her. Make her leave this awful boat!”

  “She ain’t leavin’,” Lucky said. “She’s our mascot. Now — get off this ship!”

  Mr. Barling backed away from that belligerent glare. He was pale. His pugnacity was suddenly and definitely of the past.

  Julie sighed with despair. “Hector, stop trying to bluff these men.”

  “I am not bluffing.”

  Lucky folded his arms. “Then clear out and leave us alone.”

  “I am simply saying that it is, to say the least, highly unconventional for a young girl —”

  “I’ve a right to carve out my own life,” Julie said stoutly. “I’m doing what I want to do. I’m not afraid of what people will say.”

  “That isn’t the point,” Mr. Barling blustered, perhaps because it was, in his eyes, an important point. “I know you’re shielding someone. Which of these men brought you aboard?”

  “I stowed away. They found me and were determined to put me off in Singapore. I — I bullied them into letting me stay. I’m going to stay.”

  Mr. Barling had the look of a man who suddenly finds himself in an unstrategic position. He could not go forward, and his pride would not permit his retreat. He stood, friendless and alone, on his two stout legs.

  Compelled to temporize, he said suddenly, “Just how long, may I ask, do you intend to take this attitude?”

  “Until we’ve captured the thing in the lagoon.”

  “Are you referring to the preposterous lies that one-legged bartender was telling these men in the Mudhole?”

  “If you’ll look at that handkerchief,” Julie replied, “you will see all that remains of that one-legged man. Those are his teeth — the gold ones. He was killed and eaten last night by this horrible, unknown creature that lives in the lagoon.”

  Mr. Barling looked at the assortment of teeth. He looked quickly back at Julie’s pale, lovely face with its shining brown eyes. He swallowed. He looked suspiciously at the other faces.