James Blaylock - The Ebb Tide

The tide was turning by then, and we hadn’t much time to lose, unless we wanted to wait another day for a second chance. But of course every hour that passed made it more likely that Frosticos would become aware of our little game with the forged map, if he weren’t already aware of it. It was our great hope simply to avoid him, you see. Unlike Tubby Frobisher, we had no pressing desire to feed him to feral pigs or to anything else. We meant to keep him at a safe distance, smugly busy with his own fruitless search, never knowing that we were still pursuing the device in our own more useful way.

The moon was bright, and the broad expanses of infamous sand, cut by rivulets of seawater, appeared to be solid, with shadowy hillocks and runnels that hadn’t been visible an hour ago when we had first come in sight of the Bay. It seemed quite reasonable that a person would venture out onto the sands for a jolly stroll, to pick cockles or to have a look at some piece of drowned wreckage that lay half buried off shore, only to have the place turn deadly on the instant, the tide sweeping in with the speed of a sprinting horse, or a patch of sand that had been solid yesterday, suddenly liquefied, without changing its demeanor a whit.

The opposite shore seemed uncannily near, although it must have been four miles away. We could see the scattered, late-night lights of Silverdale across what was now a diminishing stretch of moonlit water, and farther along the lights of Poulton-le-Sands and perhaps Heysham in the dim distance. There was considerable virtue in the clear, illuminated night, but an equal amount of danger, and so I was relieved when the track turned inward across a last stretch of salt marsh and away from the Bay, growing slightly more solid as the ground rose. We quickened our pace, climbing a small, steep rise, hidden by a sea wood now from the watching eyes of anyone out and about on the Bay.

Soon we rounded a curve in the track, and there in front of us stood Uncle Fred’s cottage, which he called Flotsam . It was very whimsical, built of a marvelous array of cast off materials that Fred had salvaged from the sands or had purchased from the seaside residents of that long reach of treacherous coastline that stretches from Morecambe Bay up to St. Bees, where many a ship beating up into the Irish Channel in a storm has found itself broken on a lee shore. Looking out over the Bay was a ship’s quarter-gallery, with high windows allowing views both north and south. In the moonlight the gallery appeared to be perfectly enormous, a remnant of an old First Rate ship, perhaps, and it made the cottage look elegant despite the whole thing being cobbled together, just as its name implied. The cottage climbed the hill, so to speak, most of it built of heavy timbers and deck planks and with sections of masts and spars as corner posts and lintels. On the windward side it was shingled with a hodgepodge of sheet copper torn from ships’ bottoms. It was a snug residence, with its copper-sheathed back turned toward the open ocean, and the sight was something more than attractive. There was a light burning beyond the gallery window, illuminating a long table already set for visitors. Someone, I could see, sat in a chair at the table — perhaps Uncle Fred, if he were a small man.

What amounted to something between a widow’s walk and a crow’s nest stood atop the uppermost room, giving Fred a view of the sands from on high. I noticed a movement there, someone waving in our direction and then disappearing, and the door at the side of the gallery was swinging open when we reined up in the yard. I was fabulously hungry, and weary of the sea wind and anxious to get out of it, if only for a brief time. Uncle Fred stepped out with what turned out to be a boy following along behind him.

“The ubiquitous Finn Conrad,” St. Ives said, laughing out loud to see him there. I wasn’t quite so pleased, although I kept silent. I hadn’t revealed my suspicions about the boy to St. Ives and Hasbro, because, to tell you the truth, I felt a little small about doubting him. If he was who he appeared to be, then I was a mean-spirited scrub. If he was an agent of Frosticos, then I was a fool, and perhaps a dead fool. But what on earth was he doing in this out of the way corner of the Commonwealth? I’m afraid I stood staring at him, dumfounded.

Finn nodded at us, touched his forehead in a sort of salute, and said he hoped we were feeling fit. “I’ll see to the horses, sir,” he said to St. Ives. “I rode bareback in Duffy’s Circus, before they sent me aloft. Three years as stable boy.” He took the reins and led the horses around out of the wind, strapping on feedbags with an easy confidence.

It turned out that Finn had brought with him a letter of introduction from Merton, in order to “set things up,” as Merton had apparently put it. Finn had traveled into Poulton-le-Sands by any number of conveyances, and then had come around over the bridge with a kindly farmer before making his way down the north side of the Bay on foot, having run most of the distance. He would have crossed the sands if the tide allowed, he said, in order to do his duty. St. Ives said that he very much believed it. I believed it, too, but his duty to whom?

Merton had been expansive in his letter, the incident at the shop seeming to be a rare piece of theatre now that he was removed from it. He laid out the details of the hiding of the map, the production of the forgery, and an account of St. Ives’s eagerness to search for whatever it was that had gone down into the sands all that long time ago. There was a mention of the timely appearance of young Finn, whom he recommended without reservation. Even the armadillo made its appearance upon the stage. Uncle Fred, in other words, was in the know , as the Americans might say. Who else? I wondered darkly. But soon we found ourselves in the lamplit cottage looking at a joint of Smithfield ham, boiled eggs, brown bread, a pot of mustard, another of Stilton cheese, and a plate of radishes.

“You gentlemen have your way with that ham and cheese,” Fred told us, rubbing his hands together as if he were even more pleased than we were, “and I’ll fetch us something to wet our whistles.”

“Amen,” I said, my doubts abruptly veiled by the sight of the food, and it was fifteen minutes before we slowed down enough to say anything further, when Fred abruptly announced that it was time to go.

He looked remarkably like Merton, but not half so giddy. There was an edge of authority to him that made you think of a ship’s captain — something that came from a lifetime of dangerous work in the open sea air, I suppose. Merton had revealed to us that his uncle had lost three people to the tide in the early days, and that he had lost his complacency at the same time, as he watched them being swept away into deep water, and he standing helplessly by. He wasn’t a large man, but there was a keen, wind-sharpened look in his eye, and he was burnt brown by the sun. I found that I was heartened by his rough-and-ready presence. He listened as St. Ives told him what we meant to do, his eyes narrowing shrewdly. His nephew’s letter hadn’t mentioned the diving chamber, but had revealed only that we would want a pilot. It was the diving chamber that threw him.

“It’s madness,” he said. “You’ll join the rest of them at the bottom of the sands.”

“Almost without a doubt,” St. Ives said, sitting back in his chair. “Clearly we need your help with this.”

“You’ll need help from a more powerful personage than Fred Merton,” he said.

“Granted,” St. Ives told him, “but Fred Merton is the one man on Earth that we do want. We’ll trust to providence for the rest.”

Fred sat silently, watching out the window, where the wind blew the sea oats and the moon shone low in the sky. “You mean to captain this vessel?” he asked St. Ives, who nodded his assent. “And you,” he said to me, “you’ll go along as crew?”