And the Deep Blue Sea

by Charles Williams

  He was still being thrown about in the diminishing turbulence of the wake, and now he was facing toward the ship again. He stared unbelievingly. It was well over a hundred yards away, but it was beginning to swing in a hard-over turn to port, and he could see two figures out on the port wing of the bridge, undeniably looking back at him. Gooseflesh spread between his shoulder blades, but he killed the cruel surge of hope before it had time to start. It was only somebody who hadn’t heard the word. Then he saw the big figure that could only be Eric Lind, running up the ladder to the boat deck. The word was on its way.

  Antonio Gutierrez, the Filipino messman, had just emerged from the passageway at the after end of the crew’s deck when he thought he heard something splash in the water on the starboard side. He walked over and looked down, but could see nothing; Rafferty was a hundred feet aft by that time and still below the surface. He looked off momentarily toward the squall, and was about to turn away when a gilt sandal fell past his face, followed by another, and then a long and very beautiful pair of legs dropped into view and stopped, suspended in front of his eyes so near he could have touched them if he had been capable of movement.

  Apparently performing some sort of airy dance to unheard music, they were slender and tanned, and nude all the way to the fragment of white nylon at their juncture, and could belong only to the pretty blond one he had embraced so often in the fantasies of his nights. He heard voices on the deck above him then, a shout, and a sound of tearing cloth, and she dropped past him and fell into the sea. There were more sounds from above, and then a cry in the well-deck below. He drew a shaking hand across his face and looked down to see a tall figure running toward the ladder, carrying some kind of strange pistol in his hand. It was the dead man they had buried two days ago.

  Harald Svedberg, the young third mate, didn’t know a word of Spanish or Tagalog, and even if he had it is doubtful he would have made any sense of the chaotic outpouring about dancing legs and ghosts with pistols and naked women falling so close you could reach out like that and touch them, but there is something universally compelling about the pointed finger, even that of an obvious madman. The eye follows involuntarily. He looked aft in the direction indicated by the stabbing and palsied hand and saw Goddard’s head in the white water of the wake.

  “Hard left!” he called out to the helmsman. He lifted the life ring from its bracket on the port wing of the bridge, yanked loose the canister, and threw them outward.

  Goddard saw the ship steady up from her turn to port and then begin to swing back to starboard, as he had known she would as soon as Lind had reached the bridge. Almost at the same time he spotted the white circle of the life ring as it rose to the crest of a swell ahead of him, its attached flare glowing feebly in the sunlight.

  Kicking off his slippers, he began to swim toward it. When he had reached it, the Leander had steadied up again and was back on course, going straight away from him a quarter mile ahead, trailing a plume of smoke from her ventilators as she headed into the dark line of the rain squall beyond. He tore his eyes from her, took the knife from his pocket, and cut loose the canister and its flare. Letting the knife drop, he tore off the shirt and the encumbering flannel slacks.

  From here, where the Leander had started her first turn, the wake ran straight back, traces of it still visible for several hundred yards. With no conscious thought as to why he was doing it, he slipped inside the ring, pushed straight down on it with both hands to give himself all the buoyancy possible, and raised his head as high as he could to look back along the line of the wake. He was lifted by a gentle swell, and then another, and it was while the third was passing under him that he was sure he saw her, a golden dot in the immensity of blue behind him. He dropped away down the slope and began to rise again, and this time there was no doubt. He marked her position against the edge of a cloud formation beyond, and began to swim back to her, towing the life ring.

  It was slow work, but he had covered what he thought must be half the distance and had paused momentarily to hold onto the ring and rest when the question finally occurred to him. In the name of God, why? Wasn’t it more merciful to let her drown? Unconsciousness came in probably less than a minute, and then it was over. Wasn’t that better than four or five days, and ultimate madness and death by thirst?

  He looked around then, and the Leander was gone, swallowed up in the squall, and he was only a speck in all this vast and aching void. He began kicking ahead, hurrying now, driven by fear that he might be too late. Each time he rose to the crest of a swell he looked anxiously ahead in the direction she had to be. Then he saw her. She rose to the top of a swell less than fifty yards away, only the back of her head visible above the surface.

  She disappeared, and looked as though she had gone under. No, she’d probably just dropped away behind the swell. He threshed ahead. He saw her again, closer now, but she was in trouble. She went under, and he could see her struggling weakly. A hand came out. Then her face emerged for a few seconds. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth opened as she tried to gulp for air, water ran into it, and she sank from sight. She didn’t come up again. He was still twenty yards away.

  Gasping for breath himself and driven by the awful compulsion to hurry, he tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot as he flailed ahead, but it was next to impossible in the tilting planes of the swell. He was above it, then cut off from it, and then below it. The sun was in his face, glaring off the surface and making it impossible to see beneath. The only thing to do was go beyond, and turn, with the sun over his shoulder so he could see down. He should be over it now. He lunged on for a few more strokes, and swung around, searching frantically. It might already be too late.

  Luck was with him; he saw her almost at once. A swell passed under him, and with the sun’s rays striking almost perpendicularly into the plane of its retreating slope, it was like looking into a shop window. A flash of gold caught the corner of his eye off to the right, and he turned, and she was only three or four feet below the surface less than ten feet away. He swam over and dived, twined his fingers in the aureole of blond hair streaming outward from her head, and kicked to the surface.

  Her eyes were closed, and there was no responsive movement from her body, no attempt to clutch at him at all as he held her against him with her face above the surface. How did he get the water out of her when they were both immersed in it to their chins, with no way to raise her above it? Maybe if he lay flat with the life ring under his back he would have enough buoyancy. When he was positioned, he hauled her body over his and pushed up hard into her midriff, but before her face could clear the water they both went under.

  That was hopeless, and he had wasted precious seconds. He threw one leg over the rim of the life ring and stood vertically in the water astride it. It supported them with no need to tread water when he took her in his arms and held her upright against him. He brushed back the wet hair plastered to her face. Taking a deep breath, he forced her mouth open, placed his over it, and blew. He pressed in hard on her ribs to force her to exhale.

  He took another breath and blew it into her lungs, and repeated the cycle. Twice, three times, four times. He was doing it too fast, driven by the frantic need to sense in her some sign of returning life. Slow down, damn it, he told himself harshly; it has to be the same rhythm as natural breathing. Keep going. She’s not dead. She can’t be. Please, she can’t be.

  He looked around at the numbing emptiness of the horizon and wondered if he were already mad. So after he had revived her, they’d have a scared and shaky laugh at what a close call it had been, get in the car, and drive home. Why the hell couldn’t he leave her alone? She was free, already beyond the agony and the consciousness of dying; why condemn her to go through it again? He didn’t know. She just had to open her eyes.

  He had his lips against hers, blowing inward, when he felt her move. There was a little shudder, and a gasp, and a hand brushed against his side. He pressed, and she exhaled, and when he started to force breat
h into her again, her rhythm caught and she inhaled herself. He was suddenly aware then of the intimacy of the way he was holding her, as if they were kissing or making love, with his mouth over hers and her breasts pressed tightly against his chest. The bra was gone, apparently ripped away by the force of her plunge feet-first into the water or when she was whirled through the maelstrom of the wake.

  He cursed himself for a voyeur and a ghoul, but he was aware at the same time there was nothing erotic about it; he just wanted her to open her eyes. When she did, and saw him, and said something, he would no longer be alone. Admittedly, this made no sense, but as far as he could see that was why he’d come back here. He freed the life ring, put it over her and under her arms, and held an arm across it behind her to keep her in it and to support himself. She gagged and retched and was briefly sick from the salt water she had swallowed. He washed her lips and continued to hold her while her breathing became stronger, and in a moment she opened her eyes.

  There was no comprehension in them at first. She looked blankly at him, and then around at the lonely expanse of sea and the squall bearing down on them. He expected her to cry out, or become hysterical, or faint, but she didn’t. Perhaps it couldn’t penetrate fast enough to slug you all at once. She turned her eyes back to his face, still seeming more bewildered than anything. “You—” She gagged, and tried again. “You didn’t jump in—after me?”

  “No,” he said. “They threw me over.” He explained briefly how he happened to have the life ring. She said nothing. Her chin trembled for a moment, and he could sense her struggle for control.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No.” She took a shaky breath. “It was my fault. If I’d stayed behind you—”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” His gesture included them and all the empty sea. “You had it made, if I’d left you alone.”

  “Oh. You’re apologizing for saving my life?”

  “Saving?”

  “Well, all it ever is is a postponement.” She choked, and began to cough. “And the ship might come back if the others know about it.”

  “The others haven’t got guns,” Goddard said. He told her of Mayr’s running out into the well-deck. “Either the smoke drove him out or they’d already moved him to another hiding place and somebody discovered him.”

  “Well, it’s failed now. Everybody knows he’s still alive. What can Lind do?”

  “I don’t know,” Goddard said. The thing that baffled him was that Lind could have saved himself any time in the past two days if he’d wanted to, simply by getting rid of Mayr. He’d apparently sacrificed Krasicki without a qualm; why not Mayr too? When he saw the illusion was coming apart at the seams and they were all going to be exposed it would seem the simplest way out, for a man as ruthless as Lind, would be to destroy the evidence. Instead, he had gone on in his futile and dangerous attempts to shore up the dike by getting rid of Captain Steen and Mrs. Lennox. Discipline? Ideological fanaticism? That made no sense. Of what value was Mayr to any resurgence of Nazism? He couldn’t surface anywhere on earth without being arrested, and he was the symbol of nothing but butchery and final defeat. But still Lind was apparently willing to destroy the whole crew if he had to in order to pull it off.

  Thunder crashed, nearer now, and erratic puffs of wind began to riffle the surface of the swell. To the north and west the sky was blotted out, and the impenetrable curtain of rain swept down toward them only a few hundred yards away. Suddenly Karen cried out, “Look!”

  Goddard turned and stared. Less than a half mile to the west of them the Leander had emerged from the gray line of rain. A towering column of smoke poured up from her after well-deck, shot through with red tongues of flame to the height of her stack. The fire had burst out of number three hold at last. She seemed to be on a southerly heading, but before he could be sure, the squall engulfed them and she was blotted out.

  Antonio Gutierrez crossed himself, but seemed to be incapable of any further movement. He had never been on the bridge of a ship before and he wished devoutly that he had never seen this one, but if he moved somebody might notice him. He was no longer sure any of this was really happening, anyway; his belief in his own sanity already shaken by the resurrection of a dead man, he was now confronted with the fact that he had seen a woman with long blond hair fall overboard but when he’d told the officer and pointed, what they had seen emerge from the foamy water back there was a man’s head with short black hair. Fortunately, the officer hadn’t seemed to notice this discrepancy in his story; he had told the steering man to turn the ship around and had thrown over the salvavida, but now the big first officer was striding through the wheelhouse toward them. Somebody had said he was now the captain, and his eyes were very cold and mean.

  The ship had already started her swing and Harald Svedberg was staring aft, trying to determine whether the man in the water had seen the life ring fall, when he looked around and saw Lind coming through the wheelhouse.

  “Mr. Svedberg!” Lind snapped. “Back on your course!”

  “There’s a man overboard,” the third mate started to explain, when Lind cut him off.

  “I said back on your course!” Lind turned to the helmsman. “Hard right.”

  The helmsman, a Greek ordinary seaman, glanced with momentary helplessness toward the third mate at this conflict of orders, and then began spinning the wheel back to the right. There was no arguing with that tone of voice, not from Lind.

  “Mr. Lind! I tell you there’s a man in the water back there!” the third mate said angrily. Lind might be the acting master, but this was his watch and he’d give the orders on it. He strode to the door of the wheelhouse. “I saw him myself.”

  The third mate’s protest cut off then. He stared. Hugo Mayr, now minus the eye patch, the beard-stubbled face wearing a chill smile, had just entered the opposite door of the wheelhouse carrying a machine pistol. Behind him was Karl with a Luger in his hand. The helmsman looked around at them, and his eyes grew wide with fear. The ship was swinging hard to starboard now and the squall was bearing down on them from dead ahead.

  Antonio Gutierrez, still frozen into immobility out on the wing of the bridge, saw the big sailor called Otto come up across the port side of the boat deck, also carrying a black slab of a pistol. He stepped onto the bridge behind the third mate, looked beyond him to Lind standing in back of the helmsman, and nodded. He raised the pistol and slashed it down on the third mate’s head. Svedberg’s knees buckled. He fell forward against the door facing and slid to the deck just as the advancing curtain of rain swept down on them. Otto caught him by the arm and started to drag his body to the wing of the bridge where Gutierrez was still cowering.

  “Ease your helm!” Lind snapped to the young Greek. The latter, still petrified, gave no indication he had even heard. Lind yanked him away from the wheel and flung him toward the door. He fell to his hands and knees on the bridge in the gusts of windswept rain, scrambled to his feet, and fled. “Otto, take the wheel,” Lind ordered. Otto left the unconscious third mate lying in the rain and hurried in. Lind gave him the course. He spun the wheel left to steady up.

  Lind turned to Mayr and started to say something in German just as the bos’n hurried in. Water streamed down his face, and he had a Luger shoved into the waistband of his dungarees.

  He spoke rapidly to Lind. “Those carboys are breaking in number three. Before the squall hit, you could smell alcohol all over the well-deck.”

  Lind nodded. “Nothing we can do about it. If it blows, maybe we can keep it under control. Where’s Sparks?”

  “He’s coming.”

  “Good. Cover the ladders. Shoot anybody who tries to get up here.”

  The bos’n went out into the gray confusion of wind and rain. Sparks came up the inside companionway, through the chart room. “Call the Phoenix,” Lind ordered. “Tell them to get under way on our reciprocal course at full speed. Give him a signal once an hour to home on with his RDF.”

  Sparks looke
d questioning. “Won’t we rendezvous before dark?”

  “What difference does it make now?” Mayr asked.

  “We all board her,” Lind said.

  “And what about—?” Sparks’ gesture was inclusive—the ship and the rest of the crew. Lind drew a finger across his throat. Sparks nodded and went out.

  The third mate still lay face down where Otto had left him, almost at Gutierrez’ feet. His sodden cap was nearby, blown against the canvas dodger by the buffeting gusts of wind, and a pink stain ran out of his hair across the deck that streamed with water. The messman looked down at this man he assumed was dead, and then through the flung sheets of rain at the others inside the wheelhouse. Maybe they wouldn’t notice him now if he moved. He had taken one step when there was a sound like a gigantic exhalation of breath that made his ears pop. He turned.

  Numb by now and beyond any emotion, he watched in a sort of bemused wonder as a great ball of fire and smoke shot skyward from the after well-deck, carrying with it the cartwheeling planks and flaming sections of tarpaulin from number three hatch cover, shattered and burning cases, baled cowhides, splintered dunnage, and an eruption of sparks like the climax of a fireworks display.

  This fiery debris began to rain down on the poop and into the sea alongside to die a hissing death in the water above and below, but the column of flame continued to mount, shooting up from the hatch to the height of the stack and giving off boiling clouds of smoke and a rushing and crackling sound that could be heard above the lashing of rain and the shouts of men on the decks below. Lind ran out onto the starboard wing of the bridge, looked aft, and strode back to grab up the telephone on the bulkhead behind the helmsman.