“How much can you see?” said Emma.
“Different shades of black. I can see quite a stretch of water in front, so you needn’t worry about our hitting anything, but all the shore’s the same sort of colour and Finn’s cut the hole in the neck too low for me to see the skyline. Hang on a minute and we’ll turn west. Now.”
Emma felt the hull tilt to the slow curve.
“There,” said Roddy, “I can see the sky at the end of the loch now. Not bad.”
“How are we going to get back to the jetty?”
“We may have to open the hatch once or twice and poke our noses out. Don’t forget I know this loch pretty well.”
“And you’ve sailed on it at night?”
“As a matter of fact, no. It’s against the rules.”
“I hadn’t realised there were any rules.”
“Oh, yes. Mary makes them, and father gives his assent. Like Parliament and the Queen. After that they’re rules, and we don’t break them.”
“I’d have thought you were breaking that one now.”
“Oh, this is different. It’s a rule about sailing. Ready for a turn to port—we’ll have to put the lights on to submerge, and I’d like the window to be facing away from The Huts, just in case anyone’s awake . . . That’ll do. Motor off. Right, let’s drift for a bit.”
Emma listened to the diminishing noise of the ripples on the hull; they took a long time to reach stillness.
“Hey!” said Roddy, “What was that? Duck or something scuttling across in front of us. We must have given it a scare. Right, lights on. You’d better give the orders for submerging—you’ve had more practise than me.”
Emma followed the familiar routine and listened to the familiar gurgles below deck. This was the bit that always made her palms sweat, which in turn made the stop-cocks slippery to twist. They got the trim right, with the submarine barely buoyant, at the third adjustment; then Emma switched on the big lantern as Roddy switched off the lights.
As usual—it was almost a superstition now—she checked the position of the weight-release.
“Ready?” said Roddy. “Motor . . . Hey! That’s not a duck!”
“What isn’t? I wouldn’t have thought you could see anything.”
“Not much, but the surface is whitish from underneath, like a mirror, and there was something going across it, bigger than a dog-fish.”
“It might be one of Andy’s pieces of rotting weed.”
“Jet-propelled weed. It was going like a speed-boat. There’s another!”
“Let’s follow them and see.”
“Not a hope. They were going at least twenty knots. But they came from the same direction, and if we go that way . . . Motor on. What was that?”
“The spark,” said Emma. “You always get one.”
“No. Something hit the boat, just to the right of me. Didn’t you feel it?”
“Feel it? Roddy, pay attention to the steering—you’re all over the place—I can’t keep level if . . . That’s better. Roddy, we must have hit something. Do let’s go up.”
Emma cut the motor without orders, panicky. They were well under water, as Roddy’s inattention had sent them into a sudden dive, so there was not even the sound of a ripple to hide the slapping and grating jar of something biffing heavily into the metal just behind the conning-tower—behind, so there was no question of Anadyomene having knocked against a submerged log or something.
“Come round here, quick!” hissed Roddy. “Turn the torch off.”
Emma banged her shin on the frame that held the batteries as she stumbled her way round in the blackness; she found Roddy by touch, and squeezed beside him into the broad seat. At once she saw something weird, but not at all like what Roddy had been talking about—short green vertical lines poised in the corner of the window, and glowing. No, that was only the compass. The difficulty was to look through the glass, and not just at it. Outside was emptier than anything she could imagine, no shape, no colour, no depth, no distance.
“Wait,” breathed Roddy. “I think we’re going up, but only just. Wait. There!”
It was a hurtling shadow, going from right to left, long and thin at either end, with a bulge in the middle. It was impossible to guess whether it was a small shadow near or a huge shadow far, because there was nothing to measure distance by. Then another. Then . . .
This shadow, larger (perhaps because it was nearer) turned from its path, towards the watchers. In the instant that its shape blanked out the whole window they heard the slapping grate and felt the hull jar.
“It attacked us,” said Roddy. He sounded frightened, but interested—fascinated, even. Emma felt the same—she was chilly and trembling and couldn’t stop swallowing at nothing, but also she wanted to know. More than all terror she wanted to know.
“That light right up in the bows,” she said. “Does it turn on? I don’t know if Andy fixed it, but it’s there.”
“Look,” said Roddy, “there’s one going the other way. Shut your eyes while I turn the lights on and look for the switch; then you won’t have to get used to the dark again.”
Emma pressed her palms against her eyelids and looked at the other dark, mottled with the drifting pattern of her own bloodvesseis.
“That one’s the inside lights,” she heard Roddy say. “Yes, I don’t see . . . Oh, hang on a sec and shift forward a bit, it might be your side. Yes, that’s it. ‘Wow, it’s a sort of searchlight. Shall I leave it on?”
With an effort Emma didn’t look, but continued to stare into her private dark.
“Switch it off;” she said, “and wait. Then we’ll switch on the moment we see anything. That’s how Daddy takes his animal photographs in the game-reserves.”
“You know best. OK, you can open your eyes. Feel along my arm and you’ll find the switch—it goes sideways, forward, to go on.”
Staring through the glass Emma began to feel along the rough jersey. Another shadow blinked in the slot of dark before she reached his fingers; it wasn’t a switch—more like a little lever: if the light at the front really was a searchlight, perhaps it needed a more powerful current than an ordinary switch could cope with. Roddy edged back, and she felt his cheekbone hard against hers as he joined her in peering at the void.
“Can’t see a thing,” he grumbled.
“Wait.”
“There!”
Emma flicked the switch and the darkness was water, green, glowing from underneath, and a shape was hurtling out of the orb of light, a grey blink now, solid and not a shadow, going so fast that tiny bubbles trailed behind it glistening like dewdrops.
“Missed it,” said Roddy, letting his breath go with a snort. “The tail’s something like an eel. Switch off.”
“I thought you said it was a searchlight,” said Emma.
“It’s a damn powerful light to show that much under water,” said Roddy. “Sit still. There!”
They missed the next one completely, and the third almost completely. They would have missed the fourth if it hadn’t been two, coming from opposite directions half second apart, so that while the one that came from their right was whisking out of sight the one from their left was coming into their little slit of vision, too fast to stop. Although it was going like a torpedo it jerked itself sideways in the water almost at a right-angle, lithe in its element as a swift is in the summer air. For an instant it was swimming straight at the conning-tower, then with another jink it was out of sight, rocking the hull with the disturbance of its going.
Without thinking Emma switched the light off, as though the show was over, then shut her own eyes to give her brain a chance to sort out and tidy the mess of images that her retina had gathered.
Flippers like a turtle’s but no shell; a thin, lashing tail; a body about as big as a sack of corn, but shaped and curved to slide through the water, and of a grey, dead, fungussy colour as though the sun had never shone on it; the neck had been already curving towards her as her eyes unblinked from the shock of light, so
that she hadn’t seen how long it was—but long, long; and a lizard head, earless, tiny-eyed, huge-mouthed—a lizard mouth running back along the skull, lipless, so that all the ragged teeth showed. Out of the corner of this mouth hung the tails of two fishes.
“There’s never been anything like that,” whispered Roddy.
“Yes there has. Finn did some drawings when she was choosing a shape for our beast. She got them out of a book, the one she was reading in your boat that first day.”
“It’s not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs were monsters. Huge.”
“Mary never talks about monsters. She calls it ‘the creature’.”
“There’s one, and . . .”
Emma found she still had her eyes shut, was still seeing those teeth, that head. As she opened them to take an interest once more she heard a new noise, a gentle watery sound. The world outside the window had a roof now, a roof of wavering silver, which was suddenly rumpled as one of the black shadows, headless, hurtled across it.
“We’ve surfaced,” said Roddy. “What shall we do?”
“Let’s get the window above water and see where we are.”
“OK. I’ll put the lights on.”
The steady efficiency of the pumps was calming. When Emma settled back to her seat she found that in spite of the exercise her heart was now beating at something like its proper rate. But Roddy had hardly turned the lights out when the hull shook again to the slap and grate of another onslaught. She knew what it was now.
“It’s trying to take a bite out of Anna,” she said.
“Then it’s got sore teeth,” said Roddy. “It must be pretty stupid; Anna doesn’t look anything like a fish.”
“I don’t think they can see anything. They’re night animals, but if they used their eyes they’d be huge, like owls’. I think they hunt by smell—they’ve only attacked the places where we’ve stood, and mostly we’ve had bare feet.”
“D’you remember Mary’s story about the poachers when Andy was two? They came at night and two of their boats were upset and three men vanished. Eaten, I bet.”
He sounded pleased about it, but Emma felt sick.
“Where are we?” she said.
“I can’t see a thing. Just water and dark. We’ll have to do a circle and I’ll try and spot the end of the loch. Ready?
Just outside the conning-tower, incredibly close, a wild-cat miaowed.
“No!” shouted Emma. “We must be right up against the shore. Didn’t you hear that cat?”
“That was no cat,” said Roddy. “That was my wife. I mean it was one of the things—they call like that, I bet. No wonder I’ve never been able to find any wild-cats. It’s OK, Cousin Emma, I can see yards of water. Motor on.”
The blue spark dazzled the dark, and the motor’s hum rose, strangely comforting. Emma felt the hull tilt as Roddy took Anadyomene in a tight curve.
“There it is,” he said. “Hang on, I’m still going round . and there’s Deil’s Cleugh—I can see the waterfall. Motor off. So . . . we must be pretty well bang in the middle of the loch, but quite a long way up it, east of The Huts, I mean, up towards the shallow end. What do you fancy?”
“Go home and tell the others. You’ve got the TV people coming. You’ve got to decide what to do.”
“Andy won’t believe us. He’ll think it’s part of what you call the feud.”
“If I tell him.”
“You don’t know how obstinate he is. Cousin Emma?”
“Yes.”
“One of them had a fish in its mouth.”
“Yes.”
“They’ve all been going the same way as that one, or exactly the opposite way. And there aren’t any fish down here.”
“Oh, I see. You mean we’ve been on the path up to the shallow end, where the fish are, and that one was taking fish back to where they live—to feed its young, or something. Where do they live?”
“I don’t know. Did you see any gills?”
“No. And the dinosaurs breathed air. And a lot of them swim with their heads out of the water. Oh, there’s so much to find out! We’ve got to stop the TV people coming.”
“No hope of that now. It’s all settled, and anyway it makes the whole thing much more interesting. Bags of caravanners, and . . . ”
“Roddy, they’ve got through sixty million years by the skin of their teeth . . .”
“Sore teeth now.”
“Oh, shut up! It’s the loch, it must have something very peculiar about it, which let them get through the Ice Ages and go on hunting and breeding. It’s a balance, and they’ve adapted to it. There’ve never been enough McAndrews round the loch to alter the chemistry of the water; you haven’t got enough farm-land for the fertiliser to make a difference, and the same with sewage and things. But tourists will change all that . . . tourists will kill them. On my Uncle’s farm . . .”
“Unless they kill the tourists,” said Roddy with a laugh. “They’ll want to go night-bathing—we’ll have to get Old Crow to insure against people being eaten. Or we could ask General Kranz over for a holiday and persuade him to go swimming. I say, I wonder how much Mary knows—she always hated us swimming even by daylight—that’s why none of us are much good—and the night Finn took that film, the one you saw, she practically threw a fit.”
“Perhaps the creatures are frightened of light. Finn had her floodlights on, didn’t she? What are we going to do?”
“Find out where they come from, if we can. We’ll track them along the surface. Are you game?”
“For a bit,” said Emma.
But the track to the hunting-grounds was surprisingly narrow, and Roddy’s circle to get his bearings had taken them away from it, so they quartered the loch in vain for ten minutes before Roddy gave a yelp of triumph. And now, for some reason, far fewer of the creatures were swimming on the surface, only the occasional head surging clear for a few yards—to breathe, Emma thought. They lost the track again, found it, lost it . . .
“It’ll be easier under water,” said Roddy. “Provided they’re still swimming at all.”
So once more they submerged and began their search below the surface. The difficulty now was that with Anadyomene uncontrollable at speeds below one knot they had to do their tracking in sudden rushes and stops. Sitting by the motor-lever, listening to the hum of the motor and Roddy’s grunts and ejaculations, all Emma’s old fears returned. She could see nothing except the jigging bubble in the tube; she could do nothing except obey orders; she could only endure. She tried to think about all the brave men who had chosen, during wars, to lurk under water in similar metal traps while their enemies tried to guess where they were and drop the ripping explosives down on them. They must have been even more afraid, and yet they had chosen to do it again and again. The thought of the depth-charges led Emma to think about her enemies in the water, and to realise that she was not so afraid of them as she was of the water itself. M. Goubet’s good bronze would keep them out—unless they were to track Anadyomene home to the jetty, lured by the meat-smell; their necks were certainly long enough to reach up, and . . . It was curious that they hadn’t attacked the fibreglass head. Perhaps the smell of the resin . . .
“On course now,” said Roddy suddenly. “We can speed up a bit. There’s a big ’un. Just about as many coming as going—I suppose they’ve got to get a lot of hunting in. This time of year there’s only four hours of real dark. About Mary, Cousin Emma—I don’t think she knows anything. Not what you and I would call knowing. It’s more of a very strong superstition. I mean, it’s unlucky to swim in the dark, all the McAndrews think that. I know Father made Poop promise not to, because it would offend Mary and the others. But Andy’s friends didn’t mind offending people, of course.”
“It would probably only be unlucky if you went swimming up in the hunting-grounds, or on their track to and fro,” said Emma.
“Damn, I’ve lost them. Stand by for a turn.”
“Where are we?” Emma’s voice was sharp with panic, but she did
n’t mind. The hull was already beginning to tilt to the right.
“Running down the far side of the loch, I’m pretty certain. I’ve been keeping an eye on Andy’s compass. Not far from the cliffs, I shouldn’t be surprised, so I’m turning away from them. It’s all right, Cousin Emma. You’re in safe hands.”
“Oughtn’t we to surface?”
“It takes such ages. Half way round now—should pick them up soon . . . yes, there goes one . . . Are we level?”
“Yes.”
“It was diving, then. Slow your motor. Down we go.”
“But Roddy . . .”
“Reverse motor! Not just stop. Reverse!”
“I can’t. I’ve got to wait for it to stop or I’ll burn it out!”
“Oh, damn! Oh damn!”
“What’s happening? There, it’s stopped.”
Emma slammed the lever into full-speed reverse, and listened to the motor’s rising growl, deeper than usual because of the extra strain of taking way off the boat.
“I’m turning the outside light on,” said Roddy in a quivering voice. “Wow, we’re . . . Motor off!”
But he didn’t need to say it, because above their heads came a rasping noise that shook the hull like a drum—not enough to jar them in their seats but enough to make the bronze bubble vibrate with a bass groan. The engine too, before Emma snatched her hands off the weight-release and pulled the lever into neutral, groaned deeper and deeper as it slowed, shoving against something too solid to move.
“Caught the head on something,” said Roddy, breaking the sweaty silence.
“Where are we. What’s happened?”
“I can’t see much, but we’re under some sort of rock. I can just see the edge of it.”
“The edge of it ahead of us?”
“Yes.”
Emma Tupper's Diary Page 12
