Leslie Charteris - The Saint on the Spanish Main

The indispensable traditional octopus that had a part in every self-respecting story of sunken treasure since fiction discovered diving.

It was the first time Simon had seen it properly, even though he had helped to place it in its present location. He and Donohue and the prop man had been out there the day before on the tugboat which Donohue was using for his water work, ostensibly to scout scenery and make preparations for the following week’s shooting: the tugboat and Donohue were already known to the Coast Guard crew, and were allowed to approach without being warned off as brusquely as any other boat would have been. Simon and the prop man had dumped the deflated monster over the far side of the tug two hundred yards away and dragged it into position under water, while Donohue took the tug alongside the cutter and engaged the crew in conversation, and the keels of the two boats, which they could look up and see, provided a perfect marker for the position that Simon had to find. But then Simon had had trouble with his air regulator valve, and had had to jettison his weights and swim upwards hastily, leaving the prop man to complete the installation and inflation alone. He had steered his rise to the side of the tug away from the Coast Guard cutter, and climbed aboard where the tug’s deckhouse hid him, and soon afterwards the prop man had done the same, and then Donohue had promptly headed the tug away down the channel before they would seem to be dawdling too long in the forbidden area.

It had all worked out as slickly as a drill, and even the prop man had only been told that Donohue was determined to shoot some underwater scenes in that particular spot in spite of the prohibition.

Now that Simon saw the monster (which in their irreverent way the movie unit had christened Marilyn) in its full glory, he was ready to agree that it was a real work of art. Some of its tentacles which were not anchored to the rock, stirred no doubt by unseen tidal currents, moved sinuously like huge slothful snakes, and their undulating motion transmitted an effect of ponderously pulsing life to the bloated purple body and the malignant liquid eyes. He couldn’t despise Rawl for being scared. If he hadn’t known what it was, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it himself.

But it had worked, psychologically and with shrewd needling, exactly as the Saint had banked on it.

Now all he had to do was pick up the gold and load it into the cradle which had been lowered from April’s cruiser.

It seemed almost absurdly anticlimactic, but that was about all there was to it.

It was the kind of sunken treasure that salvage men dream about. The Santa Cecilia had gone down in a rocky basin which kept her remains together as if in a bowl. There were no shifting sands, the bane of most treasure hunts, to scatter and swallow them. Everything that had not perished was within a small radius, and he had located the area without too much trouble, as April had said he would, by the suggested shapes of such recognizables as cannons and cannon balls. It was only a matter of chipping the crusts of coral at every likely-looking spot, working with hammer and crowbar whenever he was rewarded with a yellow gleam, breaking the gold bars loose and dragging them to the cradle and putting them in...

In only half an hour he had collected as big a load as he figured the light tackle on the cruiser could comfortably handle.

He signaled on the rope for it to be hauled up, and paddled off to investigate another promising coral formation still closer to the shelf on which Marilyn sat eyeing him balefully. Under the concealing growth of living stone, he found another mound of ingots.

He wished he could have been on the cruiser’s deck, as well as down there, to share April’s excitement when she saw the first load.

He started to smile, almost getting himself a mouthful of water. The excitement on the surface would not be confined to April’s cruiser. It would spread in a flash to every other boat in the group — including Rawl’s. Somewhat belatedly, he wondered what would happen after that.

He had told April the truth about Marilyn, of course, before he started down, in a brief moment when he had her alone. But he hadn’t had time to emphasize that the secret must always be kept between them. He hoped that in her intoxication with the last-minute victory she wouldn’t let something out that would reach the ears of Rawl. It would be ironic to have victory snatched from them again on a technicality. But if Rawl cried foul, the Governors might have to sustain him. Or would Rawl prefer to accept defeat rather than ridicule?

Simon had a partial answer about April in a few minutes. She came down in the empty cradle, wearing her own aqualung, like a modern mermaid in a hammock. She could not smile, with the rubber mouthpiece deforming her lips, but as he touched her and they shook hands he saw her eyes shining and dancing behind the glass of her face mask.

Then she saw the octopus, and her eyes grew still bigger. Simon got her attention back by shaking her shoulder; then as she looked at him he pointed at the octopus, then up towards the surface, then put an upraised forefinger in front of his mouthpiece. She nodded vigorously, and repeated the forefinger gesture, and he figured that everything was still all right.

But he looked up again, and saw Duncan Rawl coming down.

There was no mistaking the glint of sunlight on his yellow curls. Or the glint of metal from the powerful spear gun couched under his arm like a lance.

The Saint’s thoughts raced in a vertiginous cascade. Had Rawl gone completely crazy with disappointment, berserk, decided to murder one or both of them regardless of the almost inevitable consequences? It seemed incredible to the Saint even as he instinctively thrust April behind him and poised himself for the flimsy chance of parrying the spear with his crowbar. Rawl was swimming down at a steep angle towards them, but on a course which began to look as if it would take him down on to Marilyn unless he pulled out of the dive at the last moment. Then was he playing for some kind of compensating glory? Since the Saint had made him look foolish by ignoring the octopus and having no trouble, was Rawl thinking of vindicating himself by killing it and then claiming to have saved the Saint’s life? That was plausible, yet it seemed hardly enough. A boast like that hardly seemed enough to salve a hypertrophied ego that had taken such punctures as he had administered to Rawl’s.

And then the answer dawned on him, with the clarity of a blueprint, as Rawl slowed his glide directly over the giant cephalopod. It was written like a book in the way Rawl glanced towards him for an instant, running his eye like a tape measure over the distance between Simon and the octopus.

Rawl only expected his shaft, when he fired it, to infuriate the creature. Then it would grab Simon and April, who were well within its reach. And Duncan Rawl would take credit for having valiantly tried to save them...

The Saint’s ribs ached from the impossibility of laughing.

Duncan Rawl fired his spear.

It twinkled like a silver arrow, straight down at Marilyn’s great amorphous body. And then the thing happened that curdled and froze the laughter in Simon’s chest.

As if the monster had watched everything with its basilisk eye, and hadn’t been fooled for a second, knowing exactly where the thing that stung it had come from — but how preposterous and fantastic could anything be? — it released the rock it sprawled on and shot straight upwards like an outlandish rocket. Its tentacles lashed around Rawl like enormous whips, and where they touched they clung. He looked like a pygmy in its stupendous eight-armed grip. One of the arms coiled around his head, then writhed away again, taking with it his mask and breathing hose. The Saint and April had one last dreadful glimpse of his face, before the final horror was blotted out in a tremendous cloud of ink.