by Paul Stewart
As he ushered me across the laboratory to the marble worktop at the opposite end, I began to detect a distinct smell of rotten fish. He stopped in front of a long, deep metal tray and removed the lid. The smell became eye-wateringly bad.
‘Bit of a pong,’ the professor conceded, ‘but you get used to it.’
I wasn’t so sure. With one hand clamped over my nose and mouth, I blinked away the tears and looked down. On the tray lay half a dozen fish, each one a different species. I recognized them all from fishmongers’ slabs in the city markets. There was a cod, a mackerel, a sea trout and a herring; a flat plaice, its skin as speckled as the sea-bed sand it had been resting upon, and a long spotted dogfish. Each of them was disfigured by a circular burn-like welt on its body, where the scales were gone and the flesh beneath was blistered and raw.
‘I collected them in the harbour,’ he said, picking up a pair of long tweezers and prodding the fish. ‘All of them were dead and floating on the surface of the water.’
‘What do you think happened, PB?’ I asked, my voice muffled since I didn’t want to remove my hand.
‘I’m not sure,’ the professor said with a shake of his head. ‘But I have a theory …’ He smiled brightly, his teeth flashing and his two black eyes crinkling up. ‘Though I’ll need your help, Barnaby.’
I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Of course,’ I told him. ‘Always happy to oblige, you know that.’
Professor Pinkerton-Barnes had theories on everything, from the accents of barking dogs to the kleptomania of magpies; from high-jumping field voles to cat-savaging bullfinches. Most of these theories, I have to concede, proved wrong – but this never dimmed the professor’s enthusiasm, and working for him was endlessly fascinating.
‘Tonight, I want you to row out into the harbour with me, to explore the base of the harbour rock.’
‘The base?’ I said, intrigued. The harbour rock stood in the middle of the bay between Gatling Quays and the Riverhythe docks, its rocky top festooned with nesting seabirds; its base, twelve fathoms or more under the water. ‘But how?’
‘You’ll see, Barnaby, my boy,’ smiled the professor, his panda eyes twinkling, ‘tonight.’
And so it was that, as the bell at the top of the East Batavia Trading Company building chimed the three-quarter hour, I found myself down by the lapping water at Riverhythe. It was Sunday night, and apart from a couple of drunken sailors who had been thrown out of taverns and were returning to their ships, and the crew of a night fishing-skiff, the quayside was quiet. I walked along the harbour wall, the stubby Spruton Bill lighthouse to my right, flashing its warnings from the treacherous mudflats as the moon rose. A lone cormorant perched on a jagged rock beside it, wings open and long black neck stretched. Herring gulls wheeled overhead, mewling like babies.
The mooring berths I passed were full of ships, large and small, from grandiose tea clippers to humble barges. Some had travelled from the other side of the world. The coal-driven Tantalus from the Moluccas with its cargo of hardwood, for instance; the double-funnelled Ocean Lord out of Valparaiso laden with copper-ore, and an elegant junk, the flag of a crimson dragon flapping from the top of its central mast, which had sailed all the way from the East China Sea with its silks, spices and lacquered cabinets.
I continued along the wall to the jetties where the smaller fishing vessels were moored. A light mist danced over the surface of the water and the boards beneath my feet bowed and creaked. To my left and right, the moored boats – their ropes secured to weather-beaten capstans – bobbed about on the low swell.
I nodded greetings to a couple of leathery-faced fishermen who were removing their snapping catch from a mound of gathered lobster-pots. Beyond them, I caught sight of a handful of purple-cheeked fishwives – their hands red raw and aprons splattered with fishy innards – as they gutted and filleted the haddocks and herrings ready for the early-morning markets, and tossed them into waiting baskets.
‘Barnaby!’ a voice rang out. ‘Over here!’
The professor was down on his knees at the very end of the jetty, head raised and waving. I waved back.
‘Good evening, PB,’ I called, as I approached. ‘Not late, I hope.’
‘No, no,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Punctual as ever. I was just making sure everything was ready.’
Lying on the boards beside the kneeling professor was an unusual-looking boilersuit. It seemed to be made out of oilskin, with gloves and boots seamlessly attached.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘This,’ said the professor, the pride in his voice unmistakable, ‘is what I call a “Neptune” suit. It’s made from the finest oiled linen and treated with my own patent mixture of rubber and wax, designed to insulate the wearer and allow ventilation for underwater exploration.’
‘I see,’ I said quietly.
‘Now, instead of goggles and a mouthpiece,’ the professor continued, ‘I’ve come up with this.’
He turned to a small wooden crate behind him. I watched as he unclicked the latch and lifted the lid. He reached in with both hands and, with a little grunt of effort, removed a metal helmet, fashioned from bolted sections of brass and inset with a glass panel.
‘There!’ he announced. ‘The “breathing-hood”. A trifle heavy and cumbersome, I grant you, but it doesn’t leak – and it won’t give you panda eyes!’
‘You want me to put on this Neptune suit of yours and go for an underwater stroll around the harbour rock?’ I asked.
The professor was always full of surprises, but this one took the scullery maid’s biscuit.
‘That’s the general idea, Barnaby, my boy,’ said the professor cheerfully. ‘And while you’re down there, I’d like you to collect some limpets. You see, I have a theory …’
I was all ears. The professor employed me because he knew I was adventurous and loved a challenge. Who else would have climbed Sir Rigby Robeson’s statue in the middle of Centennial Park to study bullfinches? Or flown a kite from the dome of the Gaiety Theatre in a thunderstorm? But with the Neptune suit, the professor was setting me his sternest challenge yet. Taking off my jacket, waistcoat and shoes, I picked up the oilskin boilersuit and clambered into it, while the professor explained his theory.
The material of the suit was stiff and ungiving, and it creaked when I moved – but it was a good fit. The professor had clearly had me in mind when he made it. Talking excitedly, he climbed into the small rowing boat moored to the jetty, and I followed him, clasping the breathing-hood under one arm.
It turned out that the professor’s theory concerned a certain type of exotic mollusc, from the other side of the world, that he believed had been brought into the harbour on the hulls of the incoming cargo ships. The Kuching scorpion limpet is believed to detach itself and hunt fish on the ocean currents, paralysing and feeding off them before returning to its rocky base at night. The professor was convinced that a colony of these shellfish had established itself at the base of the harbour rock and was responsible for the dead fish he’d discovered in the vicinity.
Untying the mooring rope and seizing the oars, the professor proceeded to row us away from the jetty and out into the harbour. He was a thin man, bony and narrow-shouldered – a typical academic – and I was surprised by how expertly he manoeuvred the rowing boat and how vigorously he pulled on the oars. The professor must have noticed, because he told me proudly that he’d rowed for his university as a student. He’d clearly lost little of his skill. We soon left the jetties behind us and, with the professor’s strong even strokes, travelled across the harbour and out into the deeper water near the harbour rock.
As we approached, the seabirds nesting in the crevices of the tall crags screeched and took to the air, wheeling in circles overhead. The professor stopped rowing, put down his oars and took the breathing-hood from me. I watched as he carefully clamped the end of a long coil of rubber tubing to a brass fitting on the helmet. The other end was attached to a contraption lying at the professor’s feet th
at resembled a pair of furnace bellows.
‘I shall pump breathable air into the hood from the ventilator here,’ he explained, placing the helmet on my head.
He tightened a series of wing nuts to the suit’s collar, ensuring it was watertight, while I got used to the peculiar sensation of being inside his Neptune suit. The gull-call and lapping water were silenced; the tangy smells of seaweed and salt water were replaced with a metallic odour, laced with something pungent like bitumen or burnt rubber, while my vision was reduced to the little rectangle of the glass panel.
‘All right?’ the professor asked, his voice sounding muffled and distant.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, my own words echoing inside the helmet.
‘Climb into the water, holding onto the side of the boat,’ the professor instructed, as he attached a rope to a buckle on the suit. ‘When you let go, the weight of the helmet will take you to the bottom. Just breathe normally, and don’t panic.’
I nodded, my breathing sounding incredibly loud inside the helmet.
‘When you want to come up, tug on this rope and I’ll pull you to the surface. There’s a full moon, but it’ll still be dark down there, so you’ll need these.’
He held up a small axe in one hand and what looked like a cross between a harpoon and a firework in the other.
‘This end is an underwater flare,’ the professor explained. ‘Pull on the cord and a magnesium compound is released and reacts with the water. It’ll give off a bright light for a minute or so, should you need it. Chip off as many limpets as you can. They’ll be dormant at this hour and shouldn’t give you any trouble.’
I hoped he was right. The professor brought his face up close to the glass panel and grinned toothily.
‘All set?’ he queried.
‘All set,’ I replied grimly.
With the professor’s help, I climbed up on the bench-board at the rear of the boat, stepped onto the side of the stern and looked down. Out here, beyond the constant swirl of the inner harbour round the wharves, the sea was relatively clear, despite the gathering sea-fret which coiled above it.
The professor tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned and nodded. It was time to take the plunge and, not for the first time, I had to place my trust in the professor and his inventions. He had yet to let me down. I bent forward and stepped backwards, feet first, into the choppy sea.
As I entered the water, I felt a cold pressure grip me firmly from all sides. Taking the harpoon-flare in one hand and the axe in the other, I let go of the side of the boat and began to sink slowly, the heavy helmet weighting me just as the professor had promised it would. Down, down, I went. The water grew darker, but I was still able to see small silver fish darting about me in the pea-green depths. After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably no more than half a minute, my feet came to rest on the soft sandy ground of the sea bed.
Just ahead of me loomed the black silhouette of the harbour rock. I concentrated on steadying my breathing while my ears grew accustomed to the wheezing of the air being pumped into the helmet. The Neptune suit, with its breathing-hood, seemed to be working. I could see my exhaled breath expelled from a side-valve and drifting up to the surface in a string of gleaming bubbles.
With long, loping strides, I crossed the sea bed, clouds of sediment rising up with every footstep. It was dark and gloomy down there, twelve fathoms under, and the currents were strong. I fought my way to within touching-distance of a dark outcrop and, wedging the axe under my left arm, freed my right hand to pull the cord on the underwater flare. There was a fizzling spark, then a sudden flaring flash at the end of the stick, and the surface of the harbour rock was thrown into brilliant relief.
It was then that I saw it …
The dark outcrop detached itself from the rock face and unfurled before me. I realized this was no limpet, scorpion or otherwise. In fact, apart from seaweed and green moss, the harbour rock was entirely devoid of life. Instead, staring back at me through hideous pink eyes was the stuff of submarine nightmares, a loathsome sea serpent of appalling size.
Its body alone must have been eight feet long and was as thick as a tea-clipper’s mast. It was fringed, top and bottom, with a ruff of mottled spines, while two muscular fins on either side flexed and flicked like draymen’s whips. But it was the creature’s head that was its most monstrous feature. Inches from the diving helmet, it was blunt and shovel-shaped, the top side pitted and scratched from countless encounters, and those cold deep-set pink eyes embedded on either side of a whiplash barbelled snout.
It raised its head and, through the glass panel of the breathing-hood, I found myself staring down into the sea monster’s terrifying maw; a cavernous dark hole surrounded by circle upon concentric circle of hooked, razor-sharp fangs. A tongue unfurled, thick and fibrous and set with three chisel-like teeth, as the creature lunged towards me.
Staring back at me was the stuff of submarine nightmares …
Suddenly, everything was a blur of movement. In my panic I dropped the flare – and harpoon – which disappeared on the current. But I managed to grab the axe in my right hand as, with a hideous scraping noise, I felt the creature’s sucker-like mouth latch onto my left arm, which I had raised instinctively to protect my head. My screams reverberating around the metal helmet, I hacked blindly at the writhing, flexing body of the monster, even as I felt the corrosive sting of its bite sinking into my forearm through the oilskin.
Repeatedly, I brought the steel axe down, puncturing the creature’s black scaly skin, penetrating the rubbery flesh beneath and then wrenching the blade free again. The water around us boiled and frothed with black scales, clumps of white flesh and billowing clouds of red blood.
Then, all at once – as abruptly as it had started – it was over. The creature released its grip on my arm and I tumbled backwards, the strong harbour current sweeping me from my feet and carrying me off, away from the harbour rock. Too late, as I was swept away, I realized that in my frenzy I had severed the rope that tethered me to the professor’s boat. At the same moment, a tremendous jerking wrench at my neck told me that the breathing tube had reached the end of its extent.
There sounded, by my right ear, a pop like a cork flying from a champagne bottle. The tube had broken free of the valve on the helmet and the breathing-hood suddenly began to fill with water.
I gulped in a last mouthful of air and then struck out for the surface, fighting the weight of the brass helmet – a moment earlier, the means of survival; now the cause of peril. Those moments in the dark waters of the harbour, being swept away on a current and fighting to get to the surface, were the longest of my life and, as the salt water rose in the helmet, filling my ears and stinging my eyes, I truly believed that they were to be my last.
Then, after a seeming lifetime of flailing, kicking, spluttering effort, my feet connected with a deep shelf of shingle. I clawed my way up it in a rattling avalanche of pebbles, the heavy helmet pressing down on my shoulders and my head ready to explode.
All at once, the helmet burst through the surface of the water and I found myself peering through the fogged glass at the shore. Dragging my exhausted body the last few yards, I made it up out of the shallows and collapsed in a heap on the mud, water draining out of the helmet like ale from an upturned –
‘The Gatling Sump,’ I whispered. ‘Of all places …’
Just beyond the sewer-opening was a place I thought I’d never have to set foot in again. Now, I realized, I had little choice. The graveyard lay between me and the jetty at Riverhythe – towards which, no doubt, a shocked and distraught professor was rowing with all his might.
I could have taken the long way round, back towards the Belvedere Mile and through the warehouses of Gatling Quays, but I was a tick-tock lad – wet, bedraggled and half-drowned, but a tick-tock lad nonetheless. I didn’t take the long way round. I took short cuts, and the shortest cut of all was through Adelaide Graveyard.
I made my way along the black railings,
went through the cemetery gates and was striding between the dark silent gravestones, when a sound made me stop in my tracks.
It was the sound of a tinkling bell …
There it was again, faint but unmistakable. Somewhere in Adelaide Graveyard, a finger-chain was ringing a headstone bell. I stopped and peered about me at the eerie array of gravestones, tomb slabs and memorial statuary that stretched away into the mist.
The bell sounded again.
Perhaps some nocturnal animal – a wharf rat or feral cat – had become entangled in the chain and was simply struggling to break free. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate.
I stumbled on through the graveyard, scanning the headstones around me as I went, hoping desperately that I was right and that this was a false alarm. A new burial with a finger-chain and bell was meant to be watched over for anything up to six days, depending on the fee. As the bell continued to ring, I fully expected a licensed gravewatcher, spade in hand, to emerge from the sentry box I was rapidly approaching through the mist. But when I got there, the box was deserted, and the brazier in front of it unlit and stone-cold.
Looking up, I glimpsed the tall tenement building of Adelaide Mansions overlooking the far side of the graveyard. A single square of light on the left of its dark façade showed that Ada Gussage’s rooms were the only ones still occupied.
I shivered violently, and winced as the dull ache in my left arm became more insistent. A wave of nausea washed over me and I crouched, head between my knees, to wait for it to pass. Blood was thumping in my head and I felt suddenly hot and feverish – but the feeling of sickness passed.
Straightening up, my Neptune suit creaking like a carriage horse’s harness, I continued on through Adelaide Graveyard. Out of the swirling mist, the stony-eyed angels on the grander tombs and gravestones stared down at me impassively, their spreading wings strangely menacing in the moonlight.
I felt light-headed and dizzy, but the intense darts of pain which now shot up my arm jolted me back to reality. I had to get to Riverhythe.
