by George Worts
Chapter 24: Starvation
FIRST OFFICER BEVAN MCTAVISH, now acting captain, wasted no time in returning the Wanderer to her old anchorage. And the ill-starred expedition to Little Nicobar entered upon its final phase. Sanity and reason were virtues of the past. After that night of horror, no man among them was rational.
There was but one course open to them: to leave instantly, to give time a chance to restore their sanity.
But they did not take this course. To the last man, even the last woman, they elected to stay. It has been said of that insane little company that they were far worse than the victims of a malignant drug which works spiritual and physical destruction.
The toxin was in the veins even of Mrs. Farrington. A week ago she had been hysterically pleading with them to sail away. Now she added her shrill voice to the counsels of vengeance.
Lucky’s reaction to the madness of the moment was typical of him. He got drunk and stayed drunk. But he no longer jeered. Personal feuds were put aside. He had always wanted to kill the monster. His hatred, too, became a mania.
Acting Captain McTavish, a cool-eyed and canny Scotchman, would have kept the Wanderer at Little Nicobar even if his crew had turned mutinous and demanded that they up-anchor and go — which none of them did. Bevan McTavish had sailed under Captain Milikin as mate in one ship or another for fourteen years, and had looked upon him with an almost filial affection. With Captain Milikin’s death, he turned dour and taciturn, and his blue Scotch eyes burned with a cruel and fanatic light. He declared he would not leave Little Nicobar until the monster was dead.
Professor Robbins was the most fanatic of them all. His dreams and hopes of taking the monster, or a living specimen of it, back to America, alive, had been discarded. He became a thin and haggard apostle of vengeance. The doctor ordered him to his bed for at least a week, to give nature a chance to restore lost blood and to heal a shattered nervous system.
For two days and nights, Bryce did not go to bed at all. He paced the main deck and the luxurious halls of the Wanderer, a gaunt and spectral figure, with burning eyes, with lips raw from gnawing, with face pinched by the pain of the amputation.
He spent days talking hatred and revenge, other days of thinking and plotting and scheming. At night, through the swirling mist, he would watch the smoky emerald of the phosphorescence and listen to the unremitting pulsing of the war drums.
It had never stopped, that drumming. Day and night it persisted, wearing down nerves, eating into brains.
One day Professor Robbins announced that he had a plan. He prefaced his explanation with the familiar statement, “I’m going to kill that thing if it’s my last act on earth.” Then he said, “We will block the lagoon. We will starve it, then lure it ashore near the stone cabin to its destruction!”
Because of its cruelty, the scheme, so far unfolded, appealed to them all. They wanted to see the thing suffer, to writhe and thresh about in the accesses of hunger; they wanted to punish it in the crudest way possible. You punish a man by striking at his weakness, whatever it may be. The surest way to punish, to inflict suffering on the monster was to deprive it of food.
In the following days, the inlet was laboriously blocked. Anchor chains were sawed into lengths and draped from shore to shore. Heavy cables were interlaced with the chains. Ropes were tangled amongst the cables. Shore parties scorned the threat of native attack and chopped down trees, which were fashioned into piles and forced into the bottom of the lagoon. Swimmers dared sharks and possible attack by the monster to dive on the seaward side of the barrier and plug chinks and crannies with rags and bunches of oakum.
The time came when the barrier was so tight that it acted almost like a cofferdam, hardly permitting the flow of the tides. The swimmers declared there wasn’t a crack big enough to admit a herring.
They rested on their labors and awaited results. Professor Robbins advised that if the blockade was ineffective, if fish were entering the lagoon by some subterranean channel, he would take other steps. He had almost seven million dollars to spend, and he would spend it. Hector Barling, only slightly less fanatical in his hatred, declared he would likewise spend every dollar of his great fortune to the end that the monster be exterminated.
But the dam did its work efficiently. On the first day following its completion, the monster began its suffering. So accustomed it had grown, through the ages, to a constant, uninterrupted supply of food, in the form of fish life, from sardines to whales, that any interruption, however brief, made it frantic. A curtailment of its food supply, caused by the yacht’s being anchored across the mouth of the inlet, had been largely responsible for its eagerness to board the yacht.
Its food supply now, however, was cut off entirely. And the creature went, beginning with that first day, into a continuous convulsion of wrath. All that day they saw it clearly, near the surface, roving about, snatching at what food was left. The next day, they saw it reach thirty feet into the air to snatch a flamingo on the wing. A long section of the cloudy gray filament, shaped like a ship’s jib and steaming with spray, leaped into the air to seize the flamingo.
On the second day its agonies were more pronounced. It circled swiftly about the lagoon. It dashed here and there. Portions of it lapped up onto the beach. Fingerlike tentacles shot here and there, frantically, groping for any substance to appease that ravenous hunger.
Bryce Robbins was quiet that day. The more frantic the convulsions of the beast became, the calmer he became. He would watch it with his eyes crinkled, a wan smile at his bitter mouth, nodding approvingly as it lunged here and there, or lashed into the air with its amazing tentacles, possibly for insects.
But the scientist was not satisfied. That night, he daringly ventured close to the barricade and tossed onto the adjacent beach chunks of beef liberally dosed with cyanide of potassium. Each chunk he salted with enough poison to exterminate a hundred men. Next morning he found a portion of the monster where he had placed the poisoned meat, a slimy mass, already rotting in the sun. He estimated that he had destroyed less than one-tenth of one per cent of the mass.
Bryce Robbins watched and smiled and at times nodded and laughed. It was as if his appetite for revenge was an equal match for the monster’s appetite for food. That night he tried another experiment. He soaked a gunnysack of rags with gasoline and tossed it on the beach. Next he threw flaming matches at the sack until it blazed. He then tossed a chunk of fish onto the beach behind the fire and waited.
The monster sensed the food, but it did not approach until the last of the flames was gone. Then, carefully, it sent tentacles encircling the spot where the fire had been — and snatched the fish!
Bryce had thus learned that the thing feared and hated fire, and this he added to his plans for its eventual destruction. But, he was in no great haste.
“We will kill it in due course,” he said.
“It is getting too desperate to stay in there much longer,” Mr. Barling said. “First thing you know it will escape into the sea. Then it’ll be lost forever.”
“If it escapes into the sea,” the scientist answered, “it won’t live. It needs that constant supply of acid from the volcanic springs to survive.”
“Do you want to let it starve to death?”
“No. The same argument applies against that scheme as against trying to blast it to death. As it starves, it will throw off portions of itself, and these will fend for themselves as they may. It might split into a thousand parts, each with its individual brain cell centers. Some of these might survive — to grow again. It would be the same if we used dynamite. We might destroy all but a tiny fragment. Not one tiny fragment shall survive!”
The professor continued his torture. He threw chunks of poisoned meat into the water. Portions of the thing detached themselves, floated on the surface, turned white and gave off an offensive smell.
And Bryce was privileged to do as he wished. His suggestions were acted upon. His insanity had affected everyone else. Even Singapo
re Sammy, that hardened adventurer, was glad to see the nameless creature suffer all the agonies which the scientist wished to inflict upon it. And presently Bryce Robbins announced his plan — based on long study of the monster, his intimacy with its traits.
“A few hundred feet inshore from the Dutchman’s cabin, we shall dig a great pit,” he announced, “We shall fill this pit almost to the brim with fish and all the meat we have left. And in the bottom of the pit, all about the walls, before we fill it with fish, we shall set drums of gasoline, on their sides, with electrical controls on their valves, so that, when a switch is closed, the gasoline will gush out of all these drums at once. Simultaneously, an electric spark will set fire to this gasoline. Instantly, four walls of flame will shoot into the air, locking that thing within them. It cannot possibly escape. It cannot possibly survive. Flaming gasoline will gush over it. Every part of it will be roasted. Every tentacle it sends out will be charred and withered and destroyed.”
Mr. Barling, admiring the plan, interposed an objection, however. He said: “Look here, Bryce: how do you figure you can dig that pit and lug all that fish and meat ashore and put it into the pit without the thing rushing ashore and attacking you?”
Bryce was ready for that. “I proved it won’t come near fire. We will build a wall of fire along the beach.”
“How about the men who go to the beach to build the fire?”
“Each will carry a ten-foot steel rod on the end of which is a burning clump of waste soaked in gasoline. Make no mistake: the thing dreads fire. It will starve to death before it will go near fire.”
And when the men betrayed doubt, he demonstrated his point. He was rowed ashore near the white dune. He carried a long steel rod, with a flaming mass of gasoline-soaked waste at the end of it, and approached the lagoon. The monster came threshing to shore. It shot tentacles into the air, but it sent none of these near Bryce Robbins.
Yet there was another source of danger — the islanders. Since those drums had started their incessant pulsing, black faces had been reported seen amongst the foliage. There had been no recurrence of the war canoe attack, but the feeling definitely prevailed that the natives were only waiting opportunity.
The work of preparing the death pit, as it came to be known, was distributed among three groups. One, to keep fires burning along the beach, to prevent the monster’s coming ashore; another to patrol the area inshore with sub-machine rifles, to keep the warlike islanders at their distance; and the third to dig the pit and arrange its pyrotechnics.
The pit was dug carefully, with sharp walls, to a depth of twenty feet. It was thirty feet square. These dimensions were considerably greater than those of the Wanderer’s swimming tank, which had once held the monster completely. The high, steep walls were provided to prevent the thing’s escape when the flames started.
Bryce Robbins divided his time between the work ashore and the Wanderer’s engine room, where Jim Axelrod, the chief engineer, was fashioning the remote-control apparatus which would, at the closing of a switch, release the flood of gasoline and ignite it. There must be twelve duplicate sets, as there were to be twelve fifty-five gallon drums of gasoline placed equally distant against the walls at the bottom of the pit. And this apparatus must perform its job perfectly — all tanks disgorging their contents simultaneously, all twelve torrents of gasoline bursting into flame at once.
And when Bryce was not engaged in the engine-room, with Jim Axelrod, or at the pit, where Singapore and Lucky Jones were in charge, he was betraying the symptoms of another kind of insanity for the benefit of Julie.
His infatuation for the lovely, brown-eyed girl had changed to obsession, and from obsession to mania. Late in the afternoon of the day when Bryce planned to complete his elaborate arrangements, Julie sent a sailor ashore for Larry, who was in charge of the “fire brigade” on the beach.
And when Larry, smoke-smudged, came out to the Wanderer, she said, “I hated to interrupt you, but I’m scared, Larry. When does Bryce plan to spring that trap?”
“Tonight, if that gang he sent fishing brings in enough bait. The refrigerators are full now, but he wants the pit filled to the brim. The gas drums are in place and the electrical apparatus is hooked up. We’re all set.” He looked at Julie curiously. “What’s the matter?”
Julie said steadily: “Bryce told me he intends to kill you and Lucky after he has killed the monster.”
Chapter 25: Bryce Attacks
LARRY MCGURK took out a cigarette and lit it. He did not seem alarmed or even surprised.
“When did he say this?”
“Just now. Just before he went ashore.”
Larry looked away from her, toward the lagoon. For a moment he watched the agitation of the water, a great patch of threshing foam, where the starving monster was plunging about, close to the barricade. He looked back at Julie.
“I think Sam suspects something is up,” he said. “He’s been keeping close to Lucky all day, and watching Bryce like a hawk. If Bryce laid a hand on Lucky in anything but a fair fight, I think Sam would kill him. He doesn’t say much about it, but Lucky means more to him than any brother. They’ve been pals for five or six years. They’ve saved each other’s lives in a dozen wild scrapes in the Far East. They’re held together by bonds that the ordinary man doesn’t even dream could exist.”
Julie said, “Yes, I know. They curse and snarl at each other — but they’d die for each other. That kind of affection is marvelous — and rare. I think you should warn Sam. Have him watch Lucky and Bryce. Bryce isn’t sane any more. And I don’t believe he will ever recover his sanity.”
“But even that doesn’t explain his sudden hate of me. He and Lucky have been ready to jump each other since the night we all met in Penang. But what has Bryce against me?”
“Isn’t it fairly obvious?” Julie looked up steadily into the smudged, bronzed face. Without changing expression or moving her eyes, she said gently, “He knows I’ll never love anyone else as long as I live.”
The blond man said, with despair: “Julie, I told you —”
“You were lying,” she said evenly. “You love me. You’ve been in love with me from the first moment. And you might say so. Isn’t it about the least you can do? I honestly don’t believe any of us is going to get away from here alive. We’ve lost our heads. We’re so many lunatics. If we weren’t lunatics we wouldn’t be here. We’re all going to die. Even you’re going to die — before your time’s up, too.”
Larry looked at her thoughtfully a moment, then took a wad of paper from his pocket, placed it in the palm of her hand and folded her fingers down upon it.
“What’s this?”
“Two wills — mine and Hector’s. Just a little something to remember me by. If you hang onto those two scraps of paper long enough, you’ll be a millionaire.”
He walked briskly away from her. For a moment the lovely blonde girl stared at the wad of paper in her hand, then she started up the deck after him. But there was no time or opportunity for a discussion of this thing that was eating into her heart.
In the confusion of last-minute preparations, Julie received two ultimatums. The first was from Lucifer Jones. That black-browed, sardonic man found an opportunity to talk to her alone.
He said, “Listen, baby. We ought to be cleaned up here tonight. Tomorrow we ought to pull out. Where you headin’?”
“I don’t know, Lucky.”
“I want to see you some more. There’s something I want to talk over with you. Is there a chance of you bein’ in Singapore in about a month?”
She repeated, “I don’t know, Lucky.”
“I look at it like this,” Lucky said, “I like Larry. I like him fine. But there’s no sense kiddin’ ourselves. He isn’t gonna last much longer. You’ll need somebody around to comfort you. I’m the guy, Julie. Meet me in Singapore in a month. That’s a date.”
He strode away. Hector Barling had something to say to her along similar lines.
He said, “Juli
e, there’s no sense beating around the bush any longer. We’ll be leaving here tomorrow. You’ll never see any of this Blue Goose gang again. You’ll forget ‘em all. And you’ll forget this blond fellow. We’ll go on with our cruise around the world. One of these days, we’ll have Captain McTavish marry us. A high seas wedding, Julie!”
They were interrupted by Bryce, coming aboard. He came on deck, a wild-eyed fanatic at the brink of realizing his mad dreams. He had stopped shaving since he had lost his arm. The beard was at the “dirty” stage. It added to that look of insane wildness.
He came aboard, shouting, “We’re ready. We’re all set! Tonight’s the night! Where’s Sam? Sam!”
Singapore Sammy answered: “What’s up?”
“Did you check that apparatus, Sam?”
“Yes. It works like a clock. I tested the batteries. I left a guard of five men at the pit. We’re ready to go.”
In the quick tropical dusk, Bryce Robbins stared at the lagoon. The swiftly waning light made of the world a shifting, changing mirage.
With the falling of the wind, sounds came clearer, the bubbling of the mud pots, the breaking surf on the barrier reef, the pulsing of the never-ceasing war drums at the base of the mystic black mountains — and the surging sound of the frantic monster, searching in a frenzy for any morsel of food. Bryce Robbins watched and smiled and sometimes softly chuckled.
Larry, with his “fire brigade” went ashore at once — the vanguard of that expedition of death. When fresh fires had been started along the beach, the tender began making trips to shore with frozen and fresh fish. Each time with a full load, it made fifteen trips. Men carried fish singly and in bags to the pit until the bottom was covered and the gasoline drums, ranged about the walls were covered.
Bryce did not believe it would be necessary to lay a trail of bait from behind the fire line on the beach to the pit, but he had this done nevertheless. He wanted no hitch in his plans.
