The Pariah

by Graham Masterton

  He swam back a little way, seized my arm, and urgently pointed upwards. I nodded. I needed no second bidding. I was almost blacking out from oxygen starvation.

  Back on the lugger, shaken as both of us were, we said nothing to Walcott or his daughter about what we had seen. Laurie made us each a cup of hot black coffee, and we rested for another 15 minutes while Walcott prepared the dynamite. Each of the two crates was heavily weighted so that it would sink directly to the bottom; and then, once we had manoeuvred it into position, it would sink just as quickly into our 20-foot hole.

  Think the weather’s going to hold?’ I asked Walcott, finishing my coffee.

  ‘C’d be,’ he remarked.

  As I shouldered my next two oxygen tanks, I thought briefly of Anne Putnam: the witch who had sacrificed herself so that I would not feel obliged to let Mictantecutli go free.

  Well, I thought to myself, I still don’t have to make a final decision, not until the copper vessel has been brought ashore; and even then I’ll have time to think it over. I believed what old man Evelith had told me, about the malevolent power that Mictantecutli could wreak; but I was still strongly tempted to let the Fleshless One go free, and recover the wife and son-to-be whom I so dearly loved:

  Yet how much was I kidding myself? How much of this desire to restore Jane to life was real conviction, and how much of it was ridiculous romantic bravado? I had already accepted Jane’s death more than I would have thought possible. What was making love to Gilly, but an acceptance that I would never be making love to Jane again? If I had left on a six-weeks’ business trip, I wouldn’t have been unfaithful: I wouldn’t even have thought of it. Yet Jane had been dead now for very little longer than that, and here I was going to bed with another woman.

  More than that: what kind of relationship was I going to be able to have with Jane, once and if she was restored to life? What do you say to somebody who’s been dead and buried?

  I was still thinking about this when Quamus gripped my arm, and said, ‘Time to go, Mr Trenton. Second-to-last dive.’

  Planting the dynamite proved to be the easiest job of all. All we had to do was tumble it end over end until it was perched on the brink of the hole we had excavated, connect the fuses, and let it sink slowly down. When both cases had disappeared into the darkness, Quamus and I packed as much grit and shell and debris as we could into the hole, to make sure that the ful force of the explosion would be directed towards the hull of the David Dark. As we swam back to the surface, paying out fuse from a small reel, I thought of Edward, and what he would have said if he had known what we were doing. I actually felt sorry for him. In a minute or two, we would be shattering the dream of his life.

  Think of the devil, however: when we broke the surface of the water, and began to splash our way back towards Walcott’s lugger, what should appear around the bow of the lugger but the Diogenes, with Edward and Forrest and Jimmy standing on the foredeck, and Dan Bass at the wheel.

  Quamus glanced at me, and I made a rotating action with my hand to indicate that he should continue to pay out the fuse. We reached the lugger and heaved ourselves up the side. Laurie and Walcott helped us on to the foredeck, and for a moment we lay there like two landed sealions, gasping for breath; but it was obvious that Edward wasn’t going to give us any rest. He beckoned Dan to guide the Diogenes right in close to Walcott’s lugger, and cupped his hands around his mouth.

  ‘Mr Walcott!’ he shouted. ‘John! What’s going on here? What are you up to?’

  ‘Just showing Quamus the David Dark, that’s all,’ I shouted back.

  ‘In a salvage boat? And what’s all that waterjet and airlift gear doing on deck?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ I told him. ‘This wreck doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s unregistered. If we want to do a little excavation of our own, that’s up to us.’

  ‘The David Dark is registered now,’ Edward shouted. ‘I just registered her this morning.

  Gilly called me up from Tewksbury and said that you’d gone off early with a whole lot of equipment.’

  Thanks, Gilly, I thought to myself. Judas in linen and lace.

  ‘Well , registered or not, we still have a perfect right to be here,’ I told Edward.

  ‘You want me to prove you wrong?’ demanded Edward. ‘You want me to cal the coastguard and have you moved away? This wreck is private property now, and part-owned by the city of Salem. Any vessel suspected of carrying out diving or unauthorized salvage anywhere in the vicinity is liable to be impounded, and the owners fined. So move out.’

  ‘Edward,’ I said, ‘I thought you and I were friends.’

  ‘Apparently we made a mistake,’ said Edward. And without saying anything else, he turned away, and directed Dan Bass to turn the Diogenes about.

  ‘Quamus,’ I said, without moving. ‘Light the fuse. Mr Walcott, start your engines and get us the hell out of here.’

  Quamus said, ‘You will not warn your colleagues?’

  ‘My ex-colleagues, you mean? Sure I’ll warn them. But get that fuse lit first.’

  Quamus struck a match, cupped his hands over the end of the fuse, and held the flame against the fabric until the explosive core of the fuse ignited. It was a fast-burning fuse, 120 cm a minute, and it quickly sparkled over the side of the lugger and disappeared under the surface of the sea. There was a light cloud of smoke, and a rush of bubbles, and then it was gone.

  Walcott gunned the lugger’s engines, and it was then that I yelled out to Edward: ‘Get going! Move! Fast as you can! Explosives!’

  I saw Edward, Forrest and Jimmy stare across at me, startled. They looked at each other in amazement, and then they looked back at me.

  Edward shouted: ‘What did you say? Explosives?’

  There was a moment’s silence; then the Diogenes’ engine blared into life, and the little boat began to move away, slowly at first, but quickly building up speed. It had only travelled about 50 yards, however, when there was a curious shaking in the ocean, a sensation quite unlike anything that I had ever felt before. It was like an earthquake, only more vertiginous, as if the world were falling into separate pieces, as if sky were becoming detached from ocean, and ocean were becoming detached from land. I felt as if we were all going to fly weightless into the air, boats, compressors, flags, diving-suits, and everything.

  Then, the surface of the sea burst apart. With a thunderous roar, an immense cliff of solid water rose into the air, 50 or 100 feet, and hung there in the morning air. A shockwave pressed against my ears, suppressing the clatter of tons of brine as it collapsed back into the sea, but my ears cleared again in time to hear the echo coming back from the Granitehead Hills, as clear as a cannon-shot.

  The deck of the lugger angled and bucked beneath our feet, and we had to cling to the rails to steady ourselves. But the Diogenes, which was much nearer the centre of the blast, was swamped first by falling water, and then by a miniature tidal-wave, which broke over her stern and must have gushed into her open hatches unchecked.

  Edward didn’t seek our help. He must have been too shocked and angry. Instead, I could see him helping the others to bail out, while Dan Bass gently nursed the hiccupping engine, and steered the Diogenes back towards Salem Harbour. There weren’t even any shouts of recrimination, or threats of calling the coastguard; but I knew that Edward would immediately report our piratical behaviour both to the coastguard and to the Salem police, and that we would be lucky to get back to shore without being arrested.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Walcott. ‘The minute that busybody gets back into harbour, the cops are going to be swarming around us like bluefish.’

  ‘We must salvage the copper vessel,’ Quamus insisted.

  ‘Disregard the police. The copper vessel is more important.’

  ‘As long as your precious Mr Evelith guarantees to bail me out of jail,’ snapped Walcott.

  ‘Mr Evelith will guarantee your complete immunity from prosecution,’ said Quamus, and the way he looked at W
alcott, there wasn’t any way that Walcott was going to argue.

  Walcott was tough, but Quamus was imperious, his expression as stony as the side of a building.

  Walcott and his daughter began to unpack the salvage floats which were stowed around the sides of the after-deck. There were twenty of these, and the idea was to attach them to the copper vessel, once we had located it, and then inflate them with compressed air, so that the copper vessel would rise to the surface and could then be towed into harbour like a raft.

  By now, the ocean all around us was bubbling and boiling with rising silt and surfacing debris. There were scores of dead fish, floating white-belly upwards, flounder and dabs, mostly, and a few bluefish. There were blackened elm timbers, carlings and deck supports and broken staves, presumably from the ship’s supply-barrels, and fragments of masts and rigging-blocks.

  ‘You’re not going to dive into the middle of that,’ said Walcott, looking down into the disturbed surface of the sea. ‘Give it a half-hour to clear up, first. Otherwise you’ll never find each other, let alone a copper trunk.’

  ‘Half an hour may be too long,’ said Quamus, narrowing his eyes towards the shore.

  ‘The coastguard could be here by then.’

  ‘Look,’ said Walcott, ‘I don’t mind taking risks. I don’t even mind a run-in with the coastguard. I’m used to it. But I’m not taking any responsibility for you and your pal diving into an ocean that’s thick with dangerous debris. Just forget it.’

  ‘We can take our own responsibility,’ said Quamus.

  ‘Maybe you can,’ Walcott retorted, ‘but you can’t dive without oxygen, and you’re not diving with any of mine.’

  Quamus stared at Walcott with such intense disapproval that Walcott had to chew on his pipe, and look away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But if you dive into that little lot, anything could happen.’

  We watched for another five minutes as more and more pieces of broken wood rose to the surface. Soon the whole area around Walcott’s lugger was littered with thousands of pieces of dark timber, the remains of one of the most historic archaeological finds in recent history. It looked as if the dynamite had completely shattered the fragile wreck of the David Dark into flinders. To piece it all together again out of this floating collection of firewood would be impossible. But I didn’t feel guilty. I knew that I had done what was necessary; and that sometimes human life has to come before human culture.

  From Salem Harbour, we suddenly heard the distant whoop of a police-boat siren, and saw its flashing red-and-white lights. Quamus seized Walcott’s arm, and said, ‘Now we must dive.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ protested Walcott, ‘it’s still too risky down there.’

  Quamus stared at Walcott with wide-open eyes. Walcott tried to look somewhere else, but Quamus somehow dragged his attention back again. I watched, puzzled, while Quamus stared and stared, the muscles flinching in his cheeks, and Walcott stared back at him, with an expression on his face of growing horror, like a man who realizes that his car is out of control and that he’s inevitably going to crash.

  ‘I - ‘ gasped Walcott, but then his nose suddenly sprang with blood, and he collapsed to his knees on the deck. Laurie knelt down beside him, and gave him an oily cloth to mop up the blood, but even though she gave Quamus a frown of disapproval, she didn’t attempt to say anything to him. I don’t think / would have done, either, after a hypnotic performance like that.

  ‘Now we must dive,’ Quamus repeated.

  But he was wrong. For, even while the police-boat siren grew clearer across the water, something rose to the surface amongst the bobbing raft of broken timbers. Laurie saw it first, and stood up, and said, ‘Look - look, Mr Quamus. Look at that.’

  We all approached the stern, and stared out at the waters of the bay. Not thirty yards away, wallowing in the waves, was a huge green casket, as long and as broad as a railroad car, but coffin-shaped, with a crucifix marked on the top of it in corroded relief.

  Quamus regarded it with a face like ivory. I felt my own blood draining through me; and my heart beating in slow, irregular bumps.

  Walcott said, ‘Is that it? Is that what you’ve been trying to find?’

  And Quamus nodded, and made a sign which I didn’t understand, an Indian sign which looked like a blessing, or a sign to ward off evil spirits.

  ‘It is Mictantecutli, the Fleshless One, the Man of Bones,’ he said. And I watched in growing apprehension as the casket dipped and yawed in the waves, silent and strange, a vessel from a long-dead century, a relic of an antique malevolence which none of us knew if we could even begin to control.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ‘Make it fast,’ ordered Quamus, and Walcott backed up the boat, engines beating slow astern, while Laurie and I leaned over with billhooks and drew the copper vessel closer.

  The surface of the vessel was heavily corroded, and time had turned it a dark, poisonous green, but all the same it was remarkable how long it had lasted underneath the silt of Salem Harbour.

  There were copper rings along either side of the casket, which presumably had been used for fastening the ropes with which the casket had first been hoisted on board the David Dark. Some of these rings had been eaten right through, but I managed to hook one that was intact, and then Laurie actually swung herself off the stern-rail, and stood on the floating casket while she ran a rope through it.

  ‘There’s no point in heading straight for Salem,’ I said. The police will catch us before we’ve gone half a mile. How about making for the wharf at Granitehead?’

  Walcott revved up his diesels. ‘They’ll probably catch us anyway,’ he said, ‘but it may be worth a shot. What do we do when we get there? That damn coffin-thing is far too big for anybody to lift.’

  ‘There’s a ramp there, and a boat-winch. Maybe we can drag it ashore with that.’

  ‘And then what? The police will be all over us by then.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe we can borrow a truck. Just give it a try, will you?’

  ‘Sure I’ll give it a try. I’ll give anything a try. I’m just asking if you had a plan in mind, that’s al .’

  ‘I’ll think of something, all right?’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  Even before we had covered quarter of a mile, however, it was clear that the police boat was going to head us off long before we could reach the Granitehead shoreline. Walcott was pressing his lugger to go as fast as it possibly could, but he wasn’t keen on burning out his bearings, and the huge green casket that we were towing behind us was nothing but sheer dead weight.

  ‘You must go faster,’ insisted Quamus, but Walcott shook his head.

  Now the police boat was within earshot, and they killed their siren and began to curve around in front of our bows, neat and fast and unavoidable. One of the officers was already balancing his way along the deck with a loud-hailer, and another stood behind him with a carbine.

  ‘Okay, slow down,’ I told Walcott. ‘There’s no point in getting shot at.’

  Walcott eased off his engines, and the lugger began to dip and drift towards a slow rendezvous with the waiting police-boat. The copper vessel caught up with us, still propelled by its own inertia, and bumped noisily against our stern.

  ‘Come out on deck with your hands on your heads,’ ordered the police officer. ‘I want all of you right where I can see you.’

  He started to walk back along the deck, but he had scarcely gone three paces when he suddenly gripped his stomach, and collapsed out of sight.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Walcott, standing up on the foredeck to get a better view.

  ‘Did you see that? He just kind of fell over.’

  The second officer, the one who had been carrying the carbine, suddenly ran to the police-boat’s cabin. Then their pilot appeared, carrying a towel and a first-aid kit.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I shouted. ‘Is everything all right?’

  The second officer glanced up at us, and then waved us away. I
turned to Walcott and said, ‘Pull up alongside. Come on, quick!’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ said Walcott. ‘This is our chance to get away.’

  ‘Pull up alongside!’ I ordered him. He shrugged, spat, and turned over the engines so that we nudged up against the trim hull of the police-boat.

  It was only when we actually touched their boat that I saw the blood. It was sprayed all over the deck as if someone had been painting the boat crimson with a firehose. The second officer appeared again, his shirt splashed with gore, his hands so bloody that he looked as if he were wearing gloves.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked him, in horrified awe.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the policeman said, in a shocked voice. ‘It was Kelly. His stomach just blew open. I mean it just blew open, and everything came out, all through his shirt.’

  He stared at me. ‘You didn’t do it, did you? You didn’t shoot him or anything?’

  ‘You know damn well we didn’t.’

  ‘Well … go back to Salem … you got me? Go back to Salem and report to police headquarters. I have to get Kelly to hospital.’

  The pilot came past, his shirt flecked with blood. He was very pale and he didn’t say anything; but went straight to the wheelhouse and started up the police-boat’s engine.

  Within a minute, the police-boat had angled away towards the harbour, its siren wailing, leaving the lugger and its attendant casket alone on the incoming tide. I looked at Quamus, and Quamus looked back at me.

  ‘We will continue to make for Granitehead,’ he decided. ‘Once they have recovered from their shock, those officers will alert the police at Salem that we are coming, and we will be arrested if we go back there. Let us tow this burden of ours on to the wharf, and I will rent or borrow a car and go back to Salem Harbour to bring the refrigerated truck.’