“Vic, c’mon, I know you’re still sober; you haven’t the money for a good soaking.” She was right, so I forced myself out of the stupor I’d wished myself into and asked her what she wanted. “I have something to show you, Vic; I think we’re back in business.” It took a few seconds for her words to sink in and in the end, I think it was the obvious sincerity in her voice that convinced me she wasn’t kidding. She must’ve seen the same thing in my eyes, because she didn’t wait for an answer. Grabbing me by the arm, she hauled me from the bar and didn’t stop until we got to the boat. From there, she shoved me up the gangplank and into the cabin. I half expected one of her friends to be present and stiffened against it, but no one was there. For the first time since we had arrived in Labuan, Carol and I shared the cabin alone.
“Sit down, Vic,” she said as she opened the secret trap beneath the bunk. I backed myself wearily into a bench at the fold-down table beneath the starboard porthole. While she was reaching beneath the bunk, I couldn’t help noticing the dinginess of the cabin, the smell of stale food and sweat and the yellowed disarray of the bed sheets on the bunk. At last she straightened and came over to the table. Remaining on her feet, she placed a typed manuscript in front of me and from what I could see of its worn and rumpled title page, it seemed to be a diary by someone named Johansen.
“So?” I said.
“I found this in the belongings of Joe Mahmoud; you remember Joe, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I took an almost sure bet. “One of your roommates, wasn’t
She didn’t bat an eye. “Right. Anyway, Joe got himself arrested a few weeks ago. He didn’t survive the experience and I was called to the police station yesterday to identify his body. It was in the yard out back. It was him all right. But since he was dead, I figured I had the right to his things. This was in them.” She rested a finger on the dirty manuscript, but I wasn’t terribly interested.
“What about money?” I asked, more to the point.
She took her hand back and rested her fists on her hips. “There was some, and since I’m the only one who’s been able to earn some bread in this partnership, I’m deciding what to do with it, got it?” I admit it, I was just too darn tired after the years at sea and months at Labuan to argue. In effect, I capitulated control of our relationship into Carol’s hands. She became the boss then, and knew it. I must have nodded, because she continued. “Joe had some money and together with the rest I’ve been able to save, we’re going to reoutfit the boat and make one more scavenger hunt.”
“Look, Carol, I’m tired. We’re never going to find anything. Why don’t we just haul up and try to make it back home?”
The stinging pain of a sharp slap across my face caught my attention but good, and, if that wasn’t enough, Carol’s hand got hold of a fistful of my hair and jerked my head back until her angry eyes were able to stare directly into my own. “Now listen up, and listen good,” she said with repressed rage. “I don’t have any intention of going back to the States empty-handed! We came out here to strike it rich, and we’ll do it yet, even over your dead body, got it?” For the first time in our long relationship, I saw Carol’s true nature: brave, resourceful, intelligent, ruthless, and utterly lacking in genuine sentiment. I’d been blinded by my own feelings when our relationship was merely one of convenience for her. But as her anger subsided and she let go her hold on my hair, she allowed the veneer of tenderness to return to her face and voice until, eerily, she was the woman I thought I’d been in love with all this time. The woman, heaven help me, I still loved.
She stroked my cheek in a way that both aroused my old passion and chilled my blood, saying, “I can see you do understand, Vic darling. You see, I remember Joe saying that this manuscript was stolen from a man named Thurston over fifty years ago by a group Joe said his father had belonged to. It was a kind of cult and when his father left it years later, he took this manuscript with him. Joe seemed to think it might be worth something and after he kicked the bucket, I looked it over and Vic, I think it just might be our ticket home.” I looked down at the manuscript with new interest and Carol noticed. “It seems that Johansen discovered an island that had recently risen up from the ocean floor somewhere in these waters and, from what I used to hear Joe saying in his sleep, there was treasure on that island that Johansen never took off.” I started to thumb the pages. “There are coordinates listed in the manuscript that show exactly where we can find it, too.”
She leaned onto the table. “I want to start getting this boat into shape again and take it out to that island, Vic, and I want to start tomorrow. I’ll go ashore and do some shopping. Tonight, you can read the manuscript, after we’ve taken care of some old business.” I looked up at her last words just as her lips met mine; pleasure like lightning coursed along my body. They lifted me from my seat as she steered me toward the bunk. My mind told me the fire of her passion cast no heat, but instinct and longing and the desire to please her were stronger, and, in the end, I never noticed the filth of the bedding.
The next few weeks were a blur of hard work as we prepared the boat for its long journey. As I busied myself with scrubbing, painting, and mechanical repair, Carol bought equipment, food, checked the diving gear, and generally kept an eagle eye on me. Finally, when the work was nearly finished, she came to me and said, “Why don’t we take the afternoon off, and go for a walk?”
I knew by then about her single-mindedness and doubted a simple walk was all she intended, so I asked, “Where to?”
“Over to the Lanes to see someone.” My eyes must’ve narrowed at that. I knew the Lanes to be the merchant district of the lower wharves area, mostly occupied by shady characters who dealt with illegal merchandise and smuggled goods. Not a healthy part of town, but one Carol seemed at home with.
An hour later, we were making our way down a crowded alley in the Lanes when Carol suddenly said, “Here it is.” She slipped into a dark doorway I would’ve missed completely and we found ourselves in a crowded, dingy room obviously meant to be a store.
I looked around, wrinkling my nose at the smell of moldering paper, a smell I’d not encountered in years. I knew before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom that we were in a bookstore. “Why’d you bring us here?”
“Because Kwan might have something that could make our voyage a little easier. You ought to know the worth of research, college boy.” The words hurt and humiliated me, and Carol knew it. “Johansen’s diary,” she continued, “mentioned good directions to that island, but there’s no harm in double checking against some old charts.”
“He also mentioned a lot of other stuff that didn’t sound too healthy…”
Carol laughed shortly. “Oh, c’mon, an educated guy like you falling for fairy tales about sea monsters, next you’ll be telling me about the tooth fairy…”
“Cut it out, Carol. You’re not funny.” She smiled that mocking smile that made my blood boil. The smile that told me she knew I’d lost my nerve, or whatever it was that made me a man, and that had enabled her to take charge. I decided to shut up rather than risk her reminding me again of our new relationship. Just then, a fat old Chinaman entered the room from behind a dirty curtain.
Carol surprised me by saying something to him in a mixture of English, Chinese, and Malay that the man actually understood. He nodded his head and began rummaging about the room until at last he’d brought over a small stack of dusty, insect-eaten tomes. Carol turned them around one by one, flipped open their covers to scan their headings, and tossed aside the ones not written in English. Some were oversize chart books that we looked through, trying to match Johansen’s descriptions with their own, and some were just literary books covering various South Seas subjects such as anthropology, ichthyology, coral reefs, geography, and tides and currents. “What about this?” Carol suddenly asked, shoving an open book in front of me. I read the title: Hydrophinnae.
“Never heard of it.” But I picked it up any
way and began thumbing through its pages, stopping here and there to scan the words. It was written in a hard-to-understand style, sort of a cross between formal English and scientific jargon. “Hey, this book is about the same stuff Johansen talks about in his diary.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the stuff about sea monsters and…yeah, this book calls it ‘Cthulhut’…” Carol didn’t give me time to continue as she clapped the book shut and, taking it from me, tossed it back onto the counter.
“Forget it,” she said, “we don’t need more fairy tales. What we’re looking for is firm directions or descriptions of that island.”
I was kind of disappointed, but I wasn’t prepared to confront Carol on the issue of keeping the book. Then she handed me another one…Unterzee Kulten read the binding. “This one’s in German,” I said.
“Oh well, then we can forget…”
“No, wait a minute; I had to learn some German for chemistry back at MIT, maybe I can dope out something here.”
“Well, what’s it about?” As I flipped through the pages, the sections with reproductions of old woodcuts caught my attention. They were usually illustrations of strange forms of sea life I’d never heard of, until I came across one that looked like a cross between a squid and an impossible jellyfish. When I looked at the legend beneath the illustration, it read “Cthulhu.” My heart skipped a beat then, and I got a flash of intuition that filled me with a vague dread. “What is it?” asked Carol, peering over the edge of the open book.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that this book mentions the same creature that Johansen describes.”
“Again?” I could tell she was really beginning to lose her patience.
“Carol, I’d like to keep this book…”
“Look, Vic, we can’t go around wasting our money on useless stuff like monster books.”
She took the book from me and threw it back on the counter, raising a small puff of dust. “These two chart books ought to come in a lot handier. How much are they, Kwan?” The Chinaman made signs indicating their value, but Carol wasn’t having any of it. She made an offer and the Chinaman took it.
The night before we were to set off, my eyes wouldn’t stay shut. Although I’d long since gotten used to sharing the narrow bunk with Carol, I found the nights uncomfortable and frequently sleepless. I sat up slowly so as not to wake Carol, who slept soundlessly, her face to the wall. In the dim starlight that came in through the two cabin portholes, I could make out enough detail to appreciate Carol’s still impressive curves and featureless skin. The long months of questionable liaisons had hardly worn her down at all. Quietly, I left the bunk, took down one of the chart books we had bought, and made my way topside. Sitting beneath the bow light, I opened the book to the title page. It was written in French, but beneath it, someone had long ago written a translation: Uncharted Waters. I’d studied the book many times since we bought it and concluded that it was a collection of maps and charts drawn up by untutored hands, mostly castaways who’d attempted to describe their unintended voyages. They were difficult to follow, but some had accurate longitudinal and latitudinal markings that made it easier to guess at the designer’s route. One in particular, that I’d pointed out to Carol, seemed to show the very island we were bound for. Of course, that was no guarantee that it existed, but it was some kind of independent corroboration of Johansen’s story. The date affixed to the chart indicated that it was first drawn sometime near the beginning of the First World War, by a drug addict who’d committed suicide by throwing himself out of a window. Sitting there under stars strange to someone born on the other side of the world, that same feeling of dread I’d experienced in the book shop came over me. Was it over these fairy tales, as Carol called them, or was it something deeper? Something to do with my very psyche, whatever it was that’d robbed me of my male pride? That was all the time I had before I heard Carol call me from the cabin doorway: “Vic, c’mon back to bed, I can’t sleep.” It wasn’t a wish, it was a command, and, still trying to understand what made me do it, I got up and followed meekly after her.
I have to admit, even though I wasn’t completely comfortable with our destination, the day we left Labuan lifted my spirits higher than they’d been since the early days along the African coast. The sea mist had suddenly lifted and a light breeze came off the ocean as I steered the boat out of the harbor into the sunlit open water. The hum of the engine sounded pretty and the sea breeze against my face was bracing, and Carol…man, Carol looked delicious as she scrambled over the deck doing the odd things that needed doing in khaki shorts and a bikini top. She was all bronzed skin and dark hair as she moved in easy, fluid motions handling the ropes and diving gear. I could almost forget the artificiality of her personality and the position she, and mostly I, kept me in. The next few weeks passed quickly with days negotiating the currents that allowed us to pass from among the islands of the Philippine Archipelago, through the southern regions of Micronesia, across the Gilberts and American Samoa, to the region where our mysterious island was supposed to rest. If all went well, we could take our treasure and head straight to Hawaii when we’d finished. Our nights were spent on calm seas and deserted lagoons in one another’s arms, frolicking in the surf, or diving naked in the shallow waters looking for shells. Living that life, I could almost forget that the past few months had ever happened, but then, at the end of the day, I’d be reminded again of who called the shots as Carol would suddenly grow serious and declare fun time over, that we needed our sleep.
At last, after endless weeks at sea, and having been out of sight of land for days, we entered the area in which, according to our charts, our mysterious island ought to be located. Idling the engines, I descended from the wheel and joined Carol at the chart table on deck. She had Johansen’s notes out and the sets of new charts and the one I had found in Uncharted Waters open alongside. “It should be around here somewhere,” she said unnecessarily. “We’ll begin a circular search pattern from this point,” she added, indicating a spot on one of the charts. Since we’d refitted with all the supplies we’d need for a month at our last landfall, there was nothing much I could say and so I said nothing.
“Let me know when you get there, I’m going aft for some sun.”
“Sure,” I said, as I watched her balance herself along the edge of the boat toward the stern. By the time I was aloft at the wheel again, I could see that she’d already stripped and was lying on a towel looking up at the sun. A pair of sunglasses hid her expression as I found myself envying the apparent self assurance she still had and that I couldn’t recapture.
It was two days later when I spotted it. “Land ho!” I called out excitedly. “Carol! Carol! I think we got it!”
Carol was lying on her towel aft again. When she heard me cry out, she didn’t bother getting dressed before she leapt for the ladder and scampered up beside me. By that time, she was as dark as brown sugar, and as trim and hard as a navy cruiser. “Where?” she said breathlessly when she reached me.
“Over there,” I said, pointing to a smudge on the horizon.
She took the binoculars and had a look. “Well, it’s in the right spot. There shouldn’t be any other islands around here.” She put the glasses down, unable to hide her glee. “Vic, this is it! This is where we hit the jackpot!” She threw her arms around me and hugged me for all she was worth, which was considerable, and I hugged back, lifting her feet from the deck and spinning us around.
When I put her down, I was relieved to see that she was still smiling as she headed for the ladder. “Head straight in and find anchorage, and I’ll get the gear set,” she said over her shoulder.
“No sweat, and don’t forget the champagne,” I replied and smacked her on the rump. She didn’t mind it at all as she slid down the ladder and disappeared below.
An hour later, the island loomed large in front of us and I guided the boat carefully parallel with the shore as Carol sat forward looking out for hidden reefs. In the
excitement of arrival, she’d prepared all the gear and pulled lookout duty without ever bothering to get dressed, a fact I didn’t have time to appreciate as I studied the island. It was strange for a South Seas island in that it didn’t seem to be volcanic in origin. Instead, although it was covered in tropical vegetation, its dark earth indicated that it’d been thrown up from the ocean floor once years before. It wasn’t a very large island either; we made the circumference in fairly short order and it seemed completely devoid of animal or bird life. At last, Carol shouted that we’d come to a spot to weigh anchor, and I turned the bow in that direction. As Carol used the plum rod to gauge the water’s depth, I eased up on the engine and then shut it down completely, allowing it to drift into a final position. “Cast anchor,” I said. I couldn’t help noticing the sun shine over Carol’s bronzed flesh as she lifted the anchor and tossed it overboard.
“Anchor aweigh,” she called, as the heavy object splashed into the sea. In another moment, Carol threw herself into the water and began swimming to the beach of black sand that stretched only a few dozen yards from the boat. When she stood up again, streaming seawater, she motioned for me to follow. Shrugging, I stripped and dove from the wheel loft and in another minute was standing beside her.
“This is a funny beach for an island like this. The land just falls away only yards from shore.”
“It makes a perfect natural harbor,” said Carol.
“I guess.” I was still looking into the water when Carol called me over to where she was standing looking at a jumble of boulders that seemed to be the end of a mountain ridge that ran from higher up inland down into the sea where we stood.
“See this? It almost looks like writing or hieroglyphics, doesn’t it?” I looked more closely at where she rested her hand, but couldn’t decide if it really was writing or just random cracks in the rocks.
Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois Page 22
