“Exactly. And they wouldn’t give Berny much peace either. I think we should be absolutely sure that we’re stuck here for life before we make a move.”
Bernice did not say anything. She turned and walked languidly away. The others watched her—a slim, brown-legged figure in her ragged, makeshift sarong, blonde hair tumbling to her shoulders.
“I agree with your viewpoint, Nick,” Lucy Brand said.
What Dawlish thought nobody knew. His face was as impassive as ever. Hands in pockets, he wandered away in the opposite direction to Bernice, Betty quickly catching up with him. When they arrived back it was growing dark and to their surprise Bernice had not returned.
“You didn’t see her when you were strolling?” Nick asked Dawlish urgently.
“No, sir. Not a trace.”
Nick hesitated no longer. He set off in the direction Bernice had taken. It was not a difficult thing for him to do, for in the sand, and later the dusty soil, the girl had left clear impressions of her bare feet. The gentle glow showed the trail distinctly and Nick began to follow it at a half run, worried that the girl should be out alone in this weird land now the night had come.
He followed her imprints for about a mile and a half, which brought him to a massive stone. Upon the stone was roughly chipped the word SIGNPOST. Harley Brand had put it there in the morning to mark the approximate spot in the outer world where the signpost stood. And the odd thing was that Bernice’s footprints stopped here, in mid-trail! There was nothing but the night and the gentle hot wind.
“Berny!” Nick yelled. “Berny, where are you?”
There was no answer, save the distant murmur of the tranquil sea. The girl had vanished and there was no conceivable place where she could be hiding, otherwise her footprints would have led straight to it. There was only the infuriating, rod-like stars, the grayness, and the impalpable distances curving over the edge of beyond.
Nick swung and began to run, arriving back at the site of the bungalow like a whirlwind. His very speed and anxiety brought the other members of the party to their feet.
“Gone, you say?” Dawlish caught at Nick’s shoulder and forced him to calm down a little. “You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! Her footprints stop in the middle of empty landscape, by Signpost Rock.”
Dawlish asked no more questions. He began moving instead—at a run, with the others hurrying behind him. When the rock was reached he gazed down thoughtfully at the sudden cessation in the footprints. He looked about him, up at the bewildering stars, and then sighed.
“Good for Miss Forbes!” he exclaimed at last.
“Good?” Nick repeated blankly. “But what in—”
“She must have found her way back,” Dawlish interrupted. “Not by any effort on her part. Somehow, by reason of the incomprehensible laws controlling this plane and the normal one, she must have stepped out of one into the other.”
Nobody spoke. The shock was stunning, all the more so because the transition had apparently been accomplished so easily. Yet so had the transition of the car.
“Then we’ve lost her!” Betty’s mouth sagged in amazement.
“Yes. But it’s encouraging. If it happened to her it can happen to us, and the vital spot seems to be around here somewhere. This is where the overlap of the two planes is most marked. It is near here where we hear the voices, and it is here where, in the ordinary world, there stands the signpost that marked the beginning of our journey here. Miss Forbes has got back: maybe we shall sometime.”
Nick made a gesture of annoyance. “This business makes one realize how limited our intelligence really is, otherwise we’d know what to do to get home. As it is we just step gingerly into the air and nothing happens. Why?”
“Because our senses do not incorporate a knowledge of four dimensions, sir,” Dawlish explained. “We only understand how to move in three. Just as a worm only knows two dimensions, length and breadth.”
“I have the feeling that I am to blame for this,” Nick muttered. “If I’d agreed to marry her she wouldn’t have wandered off. All would have been well.”
“A queer viewpoint, sir, if I may say so,” Dawlish commented. “Not so very long ago you were hinting at Miss Forbes’ selfishness: now you reveal the same tendency yourself. Surely she will be happier in natural surroundings than here?”
Nick said nothing. Hands in pockets, he considered, mooching away slowly. It was Harley’s voice that made him pause.
“Just a minute, Nick! There may be a way of discovering where Berny is—or at least if she got back safely. What about the ghostly voices? I haven’t heard them yet, and I’d like to. Surely the first place Berny would go would be Mythorn Towers?”
“That’s right!” Dawlish exclaimed quickly. “This way. The spot is marked.”
He led the others to it, half a mile distant, and sure enough as they came into the area the five could distinctly hear the ebb and flow of words and the deeper background of many more voices.
“I don’t get this,” Nick said. “It can’t still be the housewarming guests talking! Another day and night have gone past for us!”
Nobody answered: they were too busy concentrating and trying to hear. They picked up odd snatches.
“...and of course that wonderful car of his. I’m not saying anything against Nick Clayton, mind you—he’s one of the best in the world—but I do believe he thinks money can buy anything and—”
Drift, a babble like an ill-tuned radio, then sharp sentences again predominating.
“...Henry T? Oh, he’s more money than sense, otherwise he wouldn’t have bought a white elephant like this.”
None of the conversation was consecutive. Bits and pieces, mainly the senseless, ill-natured comments of a band of everyday people drinking and murmuring in holes and corners. Nowhere a mention of Bernice.
Finally Nick wandered away and the others joined him. The quiet seemed appalling after the voices.
“Evidently the voices are heard better at night than by day,” Dawlish mused. “I wonder if the sun has anything to do with it?”
“Dawlish, will you please realize something!” Nick implored. “Those viper-tongues are still wagging at the house party! How in blazes does it come to be still going when we’re nearly five or six days ahead of that period?”
“The unequal balance of Time-ratio, sir, as I said before. Here we must be living with terrific speed, but are not aware of it because we’ve nothing by which to judge. Relativity. Everything is relative. Take speed: you can only judge velocity by its relation to the fixed objects around it.”
“Then we are listening-in to a time before we ourselves vanished, and certainly long before Bernice got back?”
“I would say, sir, near as I can judge, that we are listening to the time after we left the house-warming—since many of the references concerning you and Miss Forbes have been in the past tense—but whether the time is before our actual moment of crossing from one state to the other I don’t know.”
“How long before we catch up with hearing if Bernice has got back?” Lucy Brand demanded.
“I have no idea.”
Again the impasse, the feeling that everything was utterly hopeless; yet it was balanced by the thought that perhaps at any moment one or other might follow in the wake of Bernice and step unexpectedly back into the living world where people, however shallow their natures, would live and breathe again and the sounds of normal life would come back into the quiet.
“I’m going back to the bungalow,” Nick said abruptly.
Turning, he ambled away through the grayness. Harley and his wife soon began to follow, but Dawlish was prevented from doing so by a tug on his arm from Betty. He could see her young, pretty face in the dim light, her eyes reflecting the incredible rod-like stars.
“It’s not time to turn in yet,” she said. “Can’t we walk a bit? I love doing that: you talk so intelligently.”
Dawlish laughed. “I have met few
girls who like a man to talk intelligently! Usually they are more interested in hearing him talk about them.”
“Strange man that you are,” Betty sighed, holding onto his arm and glancing at his powerful profile against the sky. “You manage to keep yourself so much to yourself—and yet you are still sociable. I think that’s wonderful.”
“If we stay here for the rest of our lives you’ll find it getting monotonous, Betty.”
“No—never!” She was quick in her denial. “You’ll always have something fresh to say, always some new corner to turn, no matter how long we stay. Even in the ordinary way I always knew you were a cut above the lounge-lizards amongst whom I mixed, only I didn’t dare say so then. I can now and it just doesn’t matter. So I can be grateful for being flung into—wherever we are. And my heart, too: that’s miles better. I keep on telling you that, don’t I?”
“You still sound very young, Betty,” Dawlish replied, with an affectionate clasp of her shoulders. “Please don’t have any false illusions about me. All you’ve got is a bad attack of hero-worship.”
“At twenty-five? Oh, no! I got over that in my teens. I also learned then to speak my mind—and I’m doing it now. I’m in love with you, Daw. Surely you can see that? Not only with you for yourself, but your knowledge, your calmness, your leadership—”
“In fact the perfect paragon!” Dawlish laughed. “No man is that, Betty—but thanks all the same. And please don’t go overboard for me completely. It might be difficult to live up to it if we happen to follow Miss Forbes back to where we belong.”
“It wouldn’t change my opinion, or my intentions—ever.” Betty had come to a halt, completely resolved. Dawlish stood looking down at her for a moment, then he took his arm away from her shoulders and kissed her.
When they returned to base they found Harley and Lucy half asleep, propped against the edge of the bungalow floor. Nick was seated not far away, chin on hands as his elbows rested on his up-thrust knees. He was looking up towards the stars as Dawlish and Betty approached him.
“Got over it yet, sir?” Dawlish enquired, settling down close by with Betty beside him.
“I’ve no choice,” he answered. “Anyway, something else has taken my attention. Take a look at those stars there—”
Dawlish and the girl glanced up and then started. For the first time since they had arrived in this quiet, calm land the stars were misted over, and as the moments passed they slowly began to disappear. From the sea a fresh wind began to rise, gathering in strength as the moments passed.
“Evidently the climate is not always perfect here,’ Dawlish said quickly, getting to his feet. “Storm of some kind is blowing up, and as we’ve no means of knowing how violent it may become we’d better get to shelter quickly.”
“Where, for instance?”
“The Mary Newton. Since we haven’t finished building the bungalow it’s our only sanctuary. Collect everything you can find.”
Dawlish hurried across to the dozing Harley and his wife and shook them into wakefulness.
“Now what?” Harley growled, then he spat and spluttered as dust and sand grains blew into his face in the wind.
“Storm coming,” Dawlish explained quickly. “We’re going to the ship. Bring all you can grab.”
Almost before they had gained the listing side of the beached vessel the storm broke in all its fury with a whiplash of lightning and vicious crack of thunder. At the same instant the gathering breeze changed abruptly to a gale, and from a gale into a hurricane. The speed at which the storm developed, and the demoniacal fury it possessed, was startling.
Led by Dawlish, the party blundered down the companionway into the cabin that had formerly been the captain’s. Here there were oil lamps ready for use in just an emergency as this. Dawlish lighted them with the ship’s matches and then looked around him in the yellow glow. Betty, Harley. Nick, and Lucy were all present, listening in some alarm to the screaming of the wind. In this cabin all seemed safe enough, and the skeletons and other traces of age had long since been moved out.
“I have the uncomfortable feeling,” Nick remarked presently, “that nothing is going to remain of that bungalow floor into which we put such labor!”
“That isn’t entirely what’s worrying me, sir,” Dawlish told him. “My fear is that perhaps the wind will blow away those stones we’ve set to mark our environment. If so, we’ll have extreme difficulty in locating the exact spots again. We might be near, but not dead on—which is as good as being infinities away. Particularly now we know Miss Forbes’ vanishing point.”
As he finished speaking Dawlish looked up with a start as with incredible fury the real force of the storm broke.
It had little parallel in the outer world, save perhaps in tropical climes. The wind shrieked until it was deafening, and the sea driven before it was also on the flood, which brought monstrous breakers thundering in-shore—which presently battered against the side of the beached ship. Glancing about them in alarm the party could do nothing but wait and see what happened. Through the porthole they had a vision of surging ocean and lightning-ripped sky.
It was not long before the thing Dawlish had feared began to happen. The ship started to quiver and vibrate as it slowly began to right itself in the surging waters. Finally it straightened up with a dizzying heave, setting the five staggering helplessly. Nick was the first to reach the porthole when the initial lunges had abated slightly.
“We’re heading out to sea!” he exclaimed. “Or at least we are on the move—carried by currents, probably.”
Dawlish lurched over the swaying floor and joined him. Outside the breakers were creaming inwards to the shore and smashing themselves against the bow of the cliffs that formed the bay. The tidal currents at this point prevented the vessel from being tossed onto the beach: instead it rode the waves and began to move outwards into the storm.
“We’re getting further away from land every moment,” Betty said anxiously, peering through the porthole. “What do we do?”
“Try and guide the ship,” Dawlish replied, swinging round. “I don’t know the first thing about seamanship, but if the helm still answers and the wheelhouse is intact we might manage something. Better come with me, sir,” he added to Nick. “It may take two of us.”
They hurried from the cabin and up the companionway. The wind smote them in a solid blast when they gained the deck. The only advantage was that it was not particularly cold, otherwise in their half-clad state they wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
Clinging to each other, and whatever projections they could find, they fought their way to the wheelhouse—but before they could enter it a gigantic wave reared, hovered, and then smashed down upon them. They were flung from their feet and slithered along the deck, hitting the rail with numbing force.
Dawlish scrambled to his feet with difficulty and helped up Nick. They lurched and reeled helplessly as the deck seemed to swing up and down beneath them.
“No use, sir, I’m afraid,” Dawlish panted. “We’d better get below while we’re in one piece. Another wave like that might break up the wheelhouse and us with it.”
They abandoned their effort and, inch by inch, crept back to the companionway, and so below. Harley and the girls looked up expectantly.
“No use,” Dawlish said, closing the door. “We’ll have to drift.”
Nobody said anything. Each seemed to be thinking what to do next. Then after a while Betty appeared to realize something and she moved to the porthole and peered through it.
“Storm’s dying down!” she exclaimed, turning eagerly. “The lighting’s ceased and I don’t hear any thunder—but from the look of things we’re a long way out on the briny. I can’t even see the shore any more.”
Dawlish joined her. Nick, Harley, and Lucy threw themselves in chairs and relaxed, waiting. Dawlish gazed out onto the pearl-gray semi-dark outside and all he could see was the gray face of slowly calming waters. The shriek of the wind had gone, and so
had the rolling of the vessel. It began to look as though the unearthly calm normal to this weird region was beginning to reassert itself.
“Yes, the storm’s practically ceased,” Dawlish admitted at length. “We’d better go up on deck and look around.”
He opened the door for Betty as she kept beside him and then followed her above. As abruptly as the storm had broken so it had now vanished. There was not a breath of wind and the sea was rapidly returning to its normal millpond quietness.
CHAPTER FOUR
ISLAND OF LOST SHIPS
“Queer,” Dawlish commented, as he gazed upon the calming scene. “Evidently, storms in this region are as crazy as everything else. We’ve moved some distance, too. Land’s out of sight.”
There were sounds to the rear as Harley, his wife, and Nick came up on deck. They looked about them, then up at the magically cleared sky. The rod-like stars were visible again.
“Think it’s ebb tide?” Harley asked, joining Dawlish.
“Perhaps. On the other hand it may be some kind of undercurrent that is moving us along. No reason why we shouldn’t try and steer. Safe enough now to go to the wheelhouse—”
“Just a minute,” Lucy interrupted, peering into the distance towards which the ship was heading. “What do you make of that?”
Everybody gazed in the same direction and gradually began to discern what Lucy meant. There was apparently a big stretch of dark land ahead, or at least something marring the smooth surface of the pearly sea. It was only as the vessel moved nearer to it, pulled by inexplicable currents, that the “island” began to assume outlines. There were curiously straight trees with cross bars on them: tilted spires at all manner of angles: great up-thrusting dark hulks
“Ships!” Nick gasped, astounded. “Dozens of ’em! All piled up into one complete island!”
“Right,” Dawlish confirmed, gazing fixedly. “An island of lost ships, all drawn there by the tidal current, in which we are now caught. And that’s where this ship will finish, too!”
His guess was right. The speed of the old ship had accelerated now and with its rivets and plates creaking it ploughed through the water towards its doomed sisters. In a matter of fifteen minutes it had reached them. The party stood back from the deck side, prepared to run for safety as the ship plunged into the midst of the rearing, rotting vessels and huge overhanging masts.
The Time Trap Page 5
