Riptide

by Douglas Preston

  Though an immense amount of flotsam and jetsam had already been removed from the drained Pit, an obstacle course of ancient junk remained. The ladder array had been deftly threaded through rotting beams, tangles of metal, and discarded pieces of drilling apparatus. The team stopped as Neidelman tapped a sensor into a small opening on one side of the Pit. As they waited for Wopner to calibrate the sensor, Hatch found his spirits beginning to flag in the mephitic atmosphere. He wondered if the rest of the team shared the feeling, or if he was simply laboring under the additional knowledge that, somewhere in this cold, dripping labyrinth, lay his brother's body.

  "Man, it stinks down here," said Wopner, bending over his handheld computer.

  "Air readings normal," came the voice of Neidelman. "We'll be installing a ventilation system over the next few days."

  As they descended once again, the original cribbing in the shaft became more clearly defined as thick layers of seaweed gave way to long hanging strings of kelp. A muffled rumble came from above: thunder. Hatch glanced up and saw the mouth of the Pit etched against the sky, the dark bulk of Orthanc rising in a greenish glow. Farther above, lowering clouds had turned the heavens iron gray. A flicker of lightning flashed a momentary, ghastly illumination into the Pit.

  Suddenly, the group below him stopped. Glancing down, Hatch could see Neidelman playing his beam into two ragged openings on either side of the shaft, tunnels that led off into darkness.

  "What do you think?" asked Neidelman, tapping in another sensor.

  "It is not original," said Bonterre, bending carefully into the second opening to affix a sensor and take a closer look. "Look at the cribbing: it is small and ripsawed, not adzed. Perhaps from the Parkhurst expedition of the 1830s, non?"

  She straightened, then gazed up at Hatch, the lance of her headlamp illuminating his legs. "I can see up your dress." She smirked.

  "Maybe we should switch places," Hatch replied.

  They worked their way down the ladder, placing stress sensors into the beams and cribbing as they went, until they reached the narrow platform at the fifty-foot level. In the reflected light of his helmet, Hatch could see the Captain's face was pale with excitement. His skin was covered with a sheen of sweat despite the chilly air.

  There came another flash of lightning and a distant sound of thunder. The rivulets of water seemed to be trickling faster now, and Hatch guessed it must be raining heavily up top. He looked upward, but the opening was now almost completely obscured by the crisscrossing beams they had passed, the drops of water flying down past his lamp. He wondered if the swell had increased, and hoped the cofferdam would hold it; he had a momentary image of the sea bursting through the cofferdam and roaring back into the Pit, drowning them instantly.

  "I'm freezing," complained Wopner. "Why didn't you warn me to bring an electric blanket? And it stinks even worse than before."

  "Slightly elevated levels of methane and carbon dioxide," Neidelman said, looking at his monitor. "Nothing to get worried about."

  "He is right, though," said Bonterre, adjusting a canteen on her belt. "It is chilly."

  "Forty-eight degrees," said Neidelman tersely. "Any other observations?"

  There was a silence.

  "Let's continue, then. We're likely to start finding more shafts and side tunnels beyond this point. We'll alternate placing the sensors. Since Mr. Wopner must calibrate each of them manually, he's going to fall behind. We'll wait for him at the hundred-foot platform."

  At this depth, the crisscrossing support beams had accumulated an incredible variety of trash. Old cables, chains, gears, hoses, even rotting leather gloves were tangled in the crossbeams. They began to come across additional openings cut into the cribbed walls, where tunnels branched off or secondary shafts intersected the main pit. Neidelman took the first one, placing sensors back twenty feet; Bonterre took the next. Then it was his own turn.

  Carefully, Hatch played out some line from his harness, stepping back from the ladder into the cross-shaft. He felt his foot sink into yielding ooze. The tunnel was narrow and low, stretching off at a sharp upward angle. It had been crudely hacked out of the glacial till, nothing as elegant as the Water Pit shaft, obviously of a later date. Stooping, he went twenty feet up the tunnel, then fished a piezoelectric sensor from his satchel and drove it into the calcified earth. He returned to the central Pit, placing a small fluorescent flag at the mouth of the shaft to alert Wopner.

  As he stepped back onto the array, Hatch heard a loud, agonizing complaint from a nearby timber, followed by a flurry of creakings that whispered quickly up and down the shaft. He froze, gripping the ladder tightly, holding his breath.

  "Just the Pit settling," came the voice of Neidelman. He had already set his sensor and moved farther down the ladder to the next cross-shaft. As he spoke, there came another screech— sharp and strangely human—echoing from a side tunnel.

  "What the hell was that?" Wopner said, behind them now, his voice a little too loud in the confined space.

  "More of the same," said Neidelman. "The protest of old wood."

  There was another shriek, followed by a low gibbering.

  "That's no goddamn wood," said Wopner. "That sounds alive."

  Hatch looked up. The programmer had frozen in the act of calibrating one of the sensors: His palmtop computer was held in one outstretched hand, and the index finger of his other was resting on it, looking ridiculously as if he was pointing into his own palm.

  "Get that light out of my eyes, willya?" Wopner said. "The faster I can get these suckers calibrated, the faster I can get out of this shithole."

  "You just want to get back to the ship before Christophe steals your glory," said Bonterre good-humoredly. She had emerged from her side shaft and was now descending the ladder.

  As they approached the hundred-foot platform, another sight came into view. Until now, the horizontal tunnels opening into the side of the shaft had been crude and ragged, poorly shored, some partially caved in. But here, they could see a tunnel opening that had obviously been carefully formed.

  Bonterre shone her light at the square opening. "This is definitely part of the original Pit," she said.

  "What's its purpose?" asked Neidelman, pulling a sensor out of his satchel.

  Bonterre leaned into the tunnel. "I cannot say for sure. But you can see how Macallan used the natural fissures in the rock for his construction."

  "Mr. Wopner?" Neidelman said, glancing up the shaft.

  There was a brief silence. Then Hatch heard Wopner respond: "Yes?" It was a quiet, unusually subdued voice. Glancing up, he saw the young man leaning on the ladder perhaps twenty feet above him, beside a flag Hatch had placed, calibrating the sensor. Wet hair was plastered down the sides of his face, and the programmer was shivering.

  "Kerry?" Hatch asked. "Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine."

  Neidelman glanced first at Bonterre, then at Hatch, his eyes strangely eager. "It'll take him some time to calibrate all the sensors we've placed so far," he said. "Why don't we take a closer look at this side tunnel?"

  The Captain stepped across the gap into the shaft, then helped the others across. They found themselves in a long, narrow tunnel, perhaps five feet high and three feet across, shored with massive timbers similar to those in the Water Pit itself. Neidelman took a small knife from his pocket and stuck it into one of the timbers. "Soft for a half inch, and then solid," he said, replacing the knife. "Looks safe."

  They moved forward cautiously, stooping in the low tunnel. Neidelman stopped frequently to test the solidity of the beams. The tunnel ran straight ahead for fifty yards. Suddenly, the Captain stopped and gave a low whistle.

  Glancing ahead, Hatch could see a curious stone chamber, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. It appeared to have eight sides, each side ending in arches that rose to a groined ceiling. In the center of the floor was an iron grating, puffy with rust, covering an unguessably deep hole. They stood in the entrance to this chamber, each breath add
ing more mist to the gathering miasma. The quality of the air had grown sharply worse, and Hatch found himself becoming slightly lightheaded. Faint noises came from below the central grate: the whisperings of water, perhaps, or the settling of earth.

  Bonterre was flashing her light along the ceiling. "Mon dieu," she breathed, "a classic example of the English Baroque style. A little crude, perhaps, but unmistakable."

  Neidelman gazed at the ceiling. "Yes," he said, "you can actually see the hand of Sir William here. Look at that tierceron and lierne work: remarkable."

  "Remarkable to think it's been here all this time, a hundred feet beneath the earth," Hatch said. "But what was it for?"

  "If I had to guess," Bonterre said, "I would say the room served some kind of hydraulic function, yes?" She blew a long cloud of mist toward the center of the room. They all watched as it glided toward the grate, then was suddenly sucked down into the depths.

  "We'll figure it out when we've mapped all this," said Neidelman. "For now, let's set two sensors, here and here." He tapped the sensors into joints between the stones on opposite sides of the room, then rose and glanced at his gas meter. "Carbon dioxide levels are getting a little high," he said. "I think perhaps we ought to cut this visit short."

  They returned to the central shaft to find that Wopner had almost caught up with them. "There are two sensors in a room at the end of this tunnel," Neidelman said to him, placing a second flag in the shaft's mouth.

  Above, Wopner mumbled something unintelligible, his back to them as he worked with his palmtop computer. Hatch found that if he stayed in one place too long, his breath collected into a cloud of fog around his head, making it difficult to see.

  "Dr. Magnusen," Neidelman spoke into his radio. "Status, please."

  "Dr. Rankin is getting a few seismic anomalies on the monitors, Captain, but nothing serious. It could well be the weather." As if in response, a low crump of thunder echoed faintly down the shaft.

  "Understood." Neidelman turned to Bonterre and Hatch. "Let's get to the bottom and tag the rest of the shafts."

  Once again, they began their descent. As Hatch moved past the hundred-foot platform toward the base of the Water Pit, he found his arms and legs beginning to shake from weariness and cold.

  "Take a look at this," Neidelman said, swiveling his light around. "Another well-constructed tunnel, directly below the first. No doubt this is part of the original workings, as well." Bonterre placed a sensor into the nearby joist, and they began moving again.

  Suddenly, there was a sharp intake of breath beneath Hatch, and he heard Bonterre mutter a fervent curse. He looked down, and his heart leaped immediately into his mouth.

  Below him, tangled in a massive snarl of junk, lay a partially skeletonized corpse, draped in chains and rusting iron, the eyeless sockets of its skull flickering crazily in the light of Bonterre's headlamp. Ribbons of clothing hung from its shoulders and hips, and its jaw hung open as if laughing at some hilarious joke. Hatch felt a curious feeling of displacement, a detached sensation, even as part of his brain realized that the skeleton was far too big to be that of his brother. Looking away and trembling violently, he leaned against the ladder, fighting to get his breath and heartbeat under control, concentrating on the rush of air into, and out of, his lungs.

  "Malin!" came the urgent voice of Bonterre. "Malin! This skeleton is very old. Comprends? Two hundred years old, at least."

  Hatch waited another long moment, breathing, until he was sure he could answer. "I understand," he said. Slowly, he unlocked his arm from the titanium rung. Then, equally slowly, he lowered first one foot, then the other, until he was level with Bonterre and Neidelman.

  The Captain played his light over the skeleton, fascinated, oblivious to Hatch's reaction. "Look at the design of this shirt," he said. "Homespun, raglan seams, a common garment among early nineteenth-century fishermen. I believe we've found the body of Simon Rutter, the Pit's original victim." They stared at the skeleton until a distant rumble of thunder broke the spell.

  The Captain wordlessly aimed his headlamp beneath his feet. Following the beam with his own, Hatch could now make out their final destination: the bottom of the Water Pit itself. A huge snarl of broken crosspieces, rusting iron, hoses, gears, rods, and all manner of machinery poked up out of a pool of mud and silt perhaps twenty feet beneath them. Directly above the snarl, Hatch could see several large shaftways converge onto the main Pit, damp seaweed and kelp dangling like steaming beards from their mouths. Neidelman moved his light around the wildly tangled ruin. Then he turned back to Bonterre and Hatch, his slender form haloed in the chill mist of his own breath.

  "Perhaps fifty feet beneath that wreckage," he said in a low voice, "lies a two-billion-dollar treasure." Though his eyes moved between them restlessly, they appeared to be focusing on something far beyond. Then he began to laugh, a low, soft, curious laugh. "Fifty feet," he repeated. "And all we have to do now is dig"

  Suddenly, the radio crackled. "Captain, this is Streeter." To Hatch, listening in his headpiece, the dry voice had a note of urgency in it. "We've got a problem here."

  "What?" the Captain said, his voice hard, the dreamlike quality suddenly gone.

  There was a pause, then Streeter came on again. "Captain, we—just a minute, please—we recommend that you abort your mission and return to the surface at once."

  "Why?" Neidelman asked. "Is there some problem with the equipment?"

  "No, nothing like that." Streeter seemed uncertain how to proceed. "Let me patch St. John in to you, he'll explain."

  Neidelman flashed a quick, questioning look at Bonterre, who shrugged in return.

  The clipped tones of the historian came across the radio. "Captain Neidelman, it's Christopher St. John. I'm on the Cerberus. Scylla has just cracked several portions of the journal."

  "Excellent," the Captain said. "But what's the emergency?"

  "It's what Macallan wrote in this second part. Let me read it to you."

  As Hatch stood on the ladder array—waiting in clammy darkness at the heart of the Water Pit—the voice of the Englishman reading Macallan's journal seemed to be coming from a different world entirely:

  I have not been easy this se'ennight past. I feel it a certainty that Ockham has plans to dispatch me, as he hath so easily dispatched many others, once my usefulness in this vile enterprise has come to an ende. And so, by dint of the harrowing of my soule in the small hours, I have decided upon a course of action. It is this foul treasure, as much as the pirate Ockham, that is evil, and hath caused our miserie upon this forsaken island; and the death of so many in its taking. It is the treasure of the devil himself, and as such shall I treate it. . .

  St. John paused and there was the rustling of a computer printout.

  "You want us to abort the mission over this?" The exasperation of Neidelman's voice was plain.

  "Captain, there's more. Here it is:

  Now that the Treasure Pitt hath been constructed, I know my time draweth to a close. My soule is at rest. Under my direction the pirate Ockham and his bande, unbeknownst, have created a permanent Tombe for these unholie gains, got by such suffering and grief. This hoard shall not be repossessed by mortal means. It is thus that I have labored, by various stratagems and conceits, to place this treasure in such wise that not Ockham, nor any other man, shall ever retrieve it. The Pitt is unconquerable, invincible. Ockham believes that he holds the key, and he shall Die for that belief. I tell ye now, ye who decipher these lines, heed my warning: to descend the Pitt means grave danger to lyfe and limbe; to seize the treasure means certayne Death. Ye who luste after the key to the Treasure Pitt shall find instead the key to the next world, and your carcase shall rot close to the Hell where your soule hath gone."

  St. John's voice stopped, and the group remained silent. Hatch looked at Neidelman: a slight tremor had taken hold of his jaw, and his eyes were narrow.

  "So you see," St. John began again. "It appears the key to the Water Pit is that there is
no key. It must have been Macallan's ultimate revenge against the pirate who kidnapped him: to bury his treasure in such a way that it could never be retrieved. Not by Ockham. Not by anyone."

  "The point is," Streeter's voice broke in, "it's not safe for anyone to remain in the Pit until we've deciphered the rest of the code and analyzed this further. It sounds like Macallan has some kind of trap in store for anyone who—"

  "Nonsense," interrupted Neidelman. "The danger he's talking about is the booby trap that killed Simon Rutter two hundred years ago and flooded the Pit."

  There was another long silence. Hatch looked at Bonterre, then at Neidelman. The Captain's face remained stony, his lips compressed and set.

  "Captain?" Streeter's voice came again. "St. John doesn't quite read it that way—"

  "This is moot," the Captain snapped. "We're almost done here, just another couple of sensors to set and calibrate, and then we'll come up."

  "I think St. John has a point," Hatch said. "We should cut this short, at least until we figure out what Macallan was talking about."

  "I agree," said Bonterre.

  Neidelman's glance flitted between them. "Absolutely not," he said brusquely. He closed his satchel, then looked upward. "Mr. Wopner?"

  The programmer was not on the ladder, and there was no response on the intercom. "He must be down the passage, calibrating the sensors we placed inside the vault," Bonterre said.

  "Then let's call him back. Christ, he probably switched off his transmitter." The Captain began to ascend the ladder, brushing past them as he climbed. The ladder trembled slightly under his weight.