Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  The torpedoes were Shanahan’s babies, they were his fish. Nobody else was supposed to interfere with them, but Shanahan found time every day, between his other duties, to check on them, side by side with his pal Frenchy, checking out the controls that would fire the fish when the helm ordered them launched.

  That day the depth charges sent their shock waves thudding against the Cichlid’s iron hull. The iron cracked. Shanahan and le Fleur exchanged a single, intense look. The only word spoken was Frenchy’s, “Odds.” Then their fingers shot out. As usual, le Fleur won.

  He reached past Shanahan and yanked open the iron door that sealed off Torpedo Tube Number One. Silently he pointed. Shanahan knew in an instant what le Fleur had in mind, knew that the thrown fingers had decided which of them would live and which would die.

  Obediently he climbed into the tube, heard the iron door clang shut behind him leaving him in silence and darkness. Then with a rush he was immersed in icy brine, disoriented and screaming. He twisted in the darkness and caught sight of the Cichlid beneath him, folding gracefully in half. Some of her lights still glowed but as he watched they winked out and then the sub was gone.

  With the sub went every officer and man of her crew, including Shanahan’s best friend.

  He was in shock now, he knew that but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He decided he was going to die. There was nothing he could do so he might as well relax and see what dying felt like.

  The next thing he knew he was staring at the sky.

  The captain of the Regensburg was a gentleman of the old school. The rules of war dictated that he pick up any survivors of the ship he had sent to the bottom, and he ordered a boat lowered and the sole survivor of the Cichlid brought on board his cruiser. Yes, he was a gentleman of the old school, or maybe he thought Shanahan had information that would prove useful to the Kaiser’s Imperial Navy. If that was his notion, he was in for a disappointment. First on board the Regensburg and then back on land, Shanahan was interrogated for weeks, then thrown into a camp with other prisoners of war to wait for the Armistice that was, by now, not long in coming.

  Every night in the German prison camp he relived the death of the Cichlid. He relived his youth as a marine mechanic working in a commercial shipyard in Providence, Rhode Island. He relived his boot camp training in the Navy, his friendship with Frenchy le Fleur, the hell-raising adventures they shared when they got shore leave and their comradeship aboard the Cichlid.

  He remembered the last meal he had shared with Frenchy, the terror that he had felt when he realized the Cichlid was under attack, and the moments when he was so near to death that he didn’t know if he was in this world or the next. But mostly he thought of his comrades, the fifty-five officers and men who had gone down with the Cichlid, leaving him, Splash Shanahan, the sole survivor of the submarine’s sinking.

  The result was funny, he thought as he set foot in the saloon on the island of Efaté. He had come home from the German prisoner-of-war camp with a fear and revulsion against water. He couldn’t drink it. He hated to wash in it. For a while he tried dry shaving but eventually he gave that up and just let his beard grow in.

  He found it hard to get a job and harder to keep one. He spent more and more of his time in saloons, moving from city to city, from respectable lodgings to flop houses to the sidewalk to the hobo jungles that grew up around freight yards and railroad depots. By the time Prohibition came in he was a drunk, and the arrival of the anti-booze laws did nothing to keep him from getting what he wanted whenever he wanted it—and whenever he could afford it.

  By the time he was twenty-five years old he looked like a man of sixty. His face was lined, his hair and beard were gray, his hands shook. He lived by begging, stealing, and lying. He ate at soup-kitchens and missions, lived in hobo jungles. Even by the lax standards of the homeless and the hopeless, he was by now a shunned figure.

  How he got to San Francisco he didn’t know, but he found himself one day wandering the city’s fishing piers, begging for a half-eaten sandwich or a half-consumed drink. He heard the sound of voices quarreling and the clank of tools. He stopped and peered, bleary-eyed, at a pair of men in watch-caps and sweaters working over an ancient one-lunger in the stern of a commercial fisherman.

  The sun cast his shadow over the men and one of them looked up, anger marking his seething eyes and his unshaven jaw. “What the hell you want, creep?”

  “Me?” Shanahan mumbled.

  “Yeah, you, who d’ya think I’m talking to, Calvin Coolidge?”

  Shanahan mumbled something.

  “Speak up, creep. Say your piece and beat it, we got work to do here.”

  “You’ve got a cracked ring gasket,” Shanahan repeated.

  “Oh, for cripes sake, just get out of here before I wallop you one.”

  The man turned back to the one-lunger but his partner, an older man, straightened up and looked Shanahan in the eye. Maybe he saw something there. He turned back and studied the cranky engine. “He’s right,” the older man said.

  “What’s that? Come on, Pops, you gonna take the word of some wobbly lush? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing, Charlie. Take a look.” He was holding a long-handled wrench. He used it as a pointer. “See that? I wouldn’t have spotted it in a million years but he’s right, we’ve got a cracked ring gasket.”

  Charlie spat an oath. “Wouldn’t ya just know it! It’s gonna take two days to get that thing off and a new one set up. It’s all the lush’s fault, that’s what I say.”

  “No it isn’t,” Pops insisted. “This guy just spotted it. He must really know engines. Hey, fella, what’s your name?”

  Shanahan told him.

  “You’re really something, Shanahan. You ever work on marine engines?”

  Shanahan hesitated, then muttered an affirmative.

  Charlie was still growling angrily about two days’ work.

  “I can fix that thing in an hour. Half an hour to get the old one off, half an hour to get the new one on, if you’ve got a new ring gasket.” Shanahan found himself getting interested in something for the first time in months, maybe years.

  “Not a chance,” Charlie growled.

  “A double sawbuck if you can do what you say,” Pops offered.

  “And no pay if you go over an hour. I can get a new ring gasket here in fifteen minutes, don’t worry about that, Shanahan.”

  The deal was struck. Charlie went off to get a new ring gasket. Pops stood by to supervise. Shanahan had the broken part off by the time Charlie got back with the new one, and he had the job done not in an hour but in thirty minutes flat.

  Pops paid off with a greasy, crumpled gold certificate. Before he handed Shanahan the bill he asked, “How would you like a job, fella? There’s always work here for a man who’s good with his hands.”

  That was the beginning of Splash Shanahan’s rebirth. He still couldn’t bring himself to drink plain water, but he drank coffee by the gallon, and he forced himself to wash. He shaved off his beard and paid for a haircut out of his first week’s pay working for Pops and Charlie.

  In the beginning his muscles ached and his body cried out for the booze it was deprived of. By the end the first week he didn’t know if he was going to make it. By the end of the second week he thought that maybe he could, and by the end of a month he realized that he was a man again. His demons were not gone, they would never be gone, but Shanahan was a man once more and he knew that he would be able to live with them.

  He worked seven days a week. His muscles hardened. The skin on his hands and his face tightened and toughened. He saved his pay. Soon he was pulling his weight as a commercial fisherman, bringing in nets of salmon and mahi mahi, even diving for abalone.

  At the end of a year he told Pops that he was quitting.

  “What’s the matter, son? You’re not trying to hold me up for more money, are you? You don’t like the atmosphere in San Francisco?”

  It wasn’t either of those th
ings. Shanahan had a hard time explaining why he had to move on, he just knew that he did. He was grateful to Pops for giving him a chance to regain his manhood and his self-respect. He’d even formed a kind of grudging friendship with Charlie. It was nothing like the bond he had felt with Frenchy le Fleur, but it was pretty good.

  But now Shanahan had to face the ocean, the ocean that had swallowed his fifty five mates on the Cichlid, including his best friend, Frenchy. The ocean had become personified to him, and he would have to face it down, one on one. To make friends with the Pacific as once he and the Atlantic had been friends before the Great War, if he could. And if he couldn’t, then he would make the Pacific his enemy, and defeat that enemy or die trying.

  How could he explain all of that to Pops? There was no way. He simply collected his pay and his gear, shook hands with Pops and with Charlie, and walked away.

  That was when he bought himself the Goby, restored and repainted the boat and started learning to run a one-man sloop and to navigate deep water.

  But those last minutes aboard Cichlid were never far away. The memories never ceased to hover around Shanahan’s mind, ready to pounce and take him in their skeletal fingers and squeeze until he realized that he was holding his breath, holding onto the last bit of air in his lungs before icy sea water invaded his body and ended his life.

  The sun woke Shanahan and he sat up, listening to the surf as it advanced and retreated across the sand. He’d had a dream, or maybe he’d been visited by Frenchy le Fleur’s ghost. How could he know?

  He’d visited Efaté before, starting with Port Vila. That was the island’s chief city. It had streets and stores. It was the seat of the local governing authority, such as it was—a commissioner sent from England and replaced every few years. The storekeepers in Port Vila took pounds, marks, pesos, francs, lire, drachmas, rupees, yen, dollars. They didn’t care. Money was money, and they would gladly exchange their merchandise for whatever kind of money the customer had to offer. Always, of course, at a discount because the customer always had the wrong kind of money.

  There was a pier at Port Vila’s waterfront, and buildings that passed for warehouses where trade goods were stowed, coming and going.

  Shanahan had climbed Mount Paponakas, had traveled the Teouma River, had swum in Emaotfer Lake. The colors, the shapes, the beauties of the islands were endless. If Pops and Charlie in San Francisco had given him back his manhood, the Goby and the islands and the Ni Vanuatu had given him back his soul.

  By late afternoon he was back at Sivin. The tide was in and he was able to wade out to the Goby for a lantern and supplies. He wore his usual costume of striped shirt and faded jeans, a flensing knife in a leather scabbard hung from his belt. The blade and his fists were the only weapons he carried and the only ones he needed. He stood on the poop looking out to sea. He thought he caught a flash of white but when he looked again it had disappeared. He waded back to shore and headed up the beach.

  It took him another hour or so to reach Valeva Cave. His heavy burden slowed him down. The kerosene lantern was light enough, and a box of matches sealed in wax against the moisture of the sea weighed next to nothing. But the iron tank, shaped eerily like one of the torpedoes that had proved useless to the sailors aboard Cichlid, challenged even Splash Shanahan’s bulging muscles.

  That was the part of Russell’s story that he had held back from Rip van Roosevelt but the trader had either guessed it or learned of it from some other source. Russell claimed that the Red Robe Men had left a treasure behind when they sailed away to the west in their floating cities.

  Russell was an old man, living out his last days back on Vanua Lava. He was comfortable, he was satisfied, he just didn’t want to be forgotten once he was gone. If Seamus Shanahan could recover the lost treasure of the Red Robe Men, all he had to do was finish Russell’s last story, the story of the lost treasure. Shanahan could keep the wealth. Russell had no need for it, no use for it. What good was Chinese gold to a dead man? Thus was the bargain struck.

  The mouth of Valeva Cave was located at the foot of a sheer cliff. There was no reaching it from above, but it was accessible from the beach when the tide was out. Once the tide came back in, anyone inside the cave had better pray that his air would last until the waters receded, or else he could drown like a rat in the clammy blackness of a stone coffin.

  Shanahan stood inside the mouth of Valeva Cave. He strapped the iron tank to his back and stepped forward. The floor of the cave had been worn smooth by the rushing waters of ten thousand years’ worth of tides. The walls and ceiling were of black basalt. The cave itself had once been filled with limestone but that had long since disappeared, dissolved and washed away by those same tides. The floor and ceiling of the cave rose steadily, although not steeply, climbing within the cliff.

  Perhaps the cave was haunted by the ghosts of Ni Vanuatu ancestors, or even by the ghosts of the Red Robe Men who had visited Vanuatu hundreds of years ago. Shanahan shuddered but kept moving. Once or twice he thought he heard something behind him, but when he turned to look back there was nothing.

  The mouth of the cave faced to the north. Standing there before he plunged into the opening Shanahan could espy Moso Island to the west and Nguna and Pele to the north and east. Once he was inside the cave the sea and the islands disappeared. Soon the mouth of the cave and the sky beyond disappeared as well, and Shanahan knelt to unseal his matches and light the kerosene lamp.

  He came across a makeshift altar. The stone surface apparently rose above high water level, for the desiccated remnants of ancient offerings lay where Ni Vanuatu priests had left them: bones, meresinfrut, kava, and red tapa cloth.

  A cold breeze sent a shiver down Shanahan’s spine. He turned around and he thought he caught a flash of light from behind him. He raised the kerosene lantern but there was nothing to be seen.

  He turned and continued into the cave. His lantern cast strange shadows on the walls. The sounds of the sea came from behind him. His time sense told him that daylight had departed outside, that the rising tide had sealed the mouth of the cave, that he was sealed in a black womb, alone and isolated from the rest of the world until such time as the falling tide opened the mouth of the cave once again. Side tunnels appeared, evidence that the cliff had once been honeycombed by limestone veins that had melted away over the centuries.

  A human figure appeared before him, holding one arm raised in warning. Shanahan blinked, a muscular hand reaching for the flensing blade on his hip. Then he realized that the path of the cave took a sharp turn just ahead of him; the figure was carved in deep bas relief and painted in realistic colors. How long the carving had stood there, how long its paint had been undisturbed, Shanahan could not tell. The facial features were those of a Chinese sage. The figure was garbed in a floor-length red robe.

  Shanahan had found the first strong evidence that the legend of the Red Robe Men was true. He stepped forward, pausing to gaze in wonder at the magnificent carving, then followed the path of the cave. He passed more carved and painted figures, each more magnificent than the last. Messages were carved in the living rock beneath their feet. Shanahan could not read them, but he recognized them as Chinese characters.

  He was deep inside the mountain now, far beyond the last evidence of Ni Vanuatu exploration or offerings. The native people had apparently decided that the cave was the abode of spirits whom they did not wish to disturb.

  Again there was a sound from behind him, but this was not the sound of the sea. It was the sound of footsteps, of hard boots on the stone floor of the cave.

  Shanahan whirled, holding the kerosene lantern above his head. A human being, small but swift and muscular, darted at him, a sharpened blade thrust ahead of it. Shanahan dodged and brought his free hand down in an angry chop. He felt the callused edge of his hand collide with the wrist of his assailant and a glittering knife spun away.

  His assailant leaped sideways, pivoted off the cavern wall, executed a twisting maneuver in mid-air and lan
ded feet first, facing Shanahan, a small revolver pointed at his belly. He launched himself forward, his kerosene lantern sailing through the air. There was a flare of flame as the lantern struck the wall and burst. At the same time there was a flash and a resounding explosion, its effect multiplied by the confined space they were in. Shanahan felt an impact and a hot streak that raced along his back just as his shoulder jolted into soft human flesh.

  The revolver clattered across the cave floor.

  The darkness that settled upon the cave was perfect and complete. Nothing could be blacker than this, not even the inside of a coffin buried six feet underground.

  A stream of expletives assailed Shanahan’s ears. He was astonished. The voice was that of a woman. Not only was Shanahan’s attacker female—even though the voice was one he had never heard before, he recognized the intonation, identical to that of his best friend, Frenchy le Fleur. It was a fantastic long-shot, but there was nothing to lose by guessing.

  “Are you Frenchy’s sister?”

  “Mais oui. Antoinette le Fleur. I am called the Sea Lynx.”

  “And I am –”

  “I know who you are, M’sieu. You are Splash Shanahan. My brother described you to perfection.”

  “How long have you been following me?”

  “A very long time, M’sieu. I know that you alone survived the sinking of the Cichlid. I know that my brother loved you above all others. I have searched the records of the Navy Department in Washington. I know that my bother gave his life for yours, M’sieu Splash Shanahan. Were it not for you—who knows—my brother might be alive today.”

  “He was my best friend, yes. I’ve not got over his loss … Antoinette.”

  The whole conversation had taken place in pitch blackness. Shanahan could hear the Sea Lynx moving around. She was searching for a weapon, he knew. Her revolver or her knife. He still had his own flensing blade but he had not drawn it from its scabbard and he did not intend to do so.