Graham Masterton - Death Trance

'Of course,' I told her, trying to be sharp.

'I just asked,' she said, and threw me a Neoprene wet suit. It wasn't like the pristine white wet suit that Edward and Forrest had lent me: it was gray and smelly, like a discarded walrus-skin, and its wrinkles were clogged with damp talcum powder. The oxygen cylinders, too, were battered and well-worn, as if they had been used to beat off marauding sharks. I guess I had to remember that Walcott was a professional salvage diver, not one of your weekend tyros. Walcott called them 'floating faggots.'

Quamus said, 'If you wish, you can change your mind. It is not good to dive if you are full of fear. Mr Evelith will understand.'

'Do I look that frightened?' I asked him.

'I would choose the word "apprehensive",' said Quamus, with the hint of an ironic smile.

'You've been reading "It Pays To Increase Your Word Power," ' I retorted.

'No, Mr Trenton. I have simply been reading your face.'

When Dan Bass had piloted us out to the David Dark , he fiddled around for almost five minutes, positioning the Diogenes over the site of the wreck. But Mr Walcott, with his deeply-bitten pipe clenched between his teeth, and his oily cap pulled well down over his eyes, swung his lugger around as if it were a Harley-Davidson, right on the datum point, and lowered his anchor so accurately that when we dived we found it caught between the David Dark’s upright fashion-pieces.

Now Walcott came back to the after-deck, and started up the one-ton Atlas-Copco compressor. This huge machine rattled and coughed and sent up blurts of black smoke, but Walcott assured it was the best in the business. It would release a jet of compressed air down a 100-foot hose, and this would hopefully excavate a hole alongside the sunken hull of the David Dark large enough and deep enough for our dynamite.

I was surprised that Walcott asked no questions about what we were doing, or why, but presumably Quamus had paid him to keep his curiosity to himself. Laurie sat on the lugger's rail, chewing a huge mouthful of Bazooka Joe, and staring at the distant horizon as if the whole business were too boring for words.

At a few minutes after nine o'clock, Quamus and I rolled backwards off the lugger's side, and began our dive. Luckily, the water in the harbour was unusually clear, and it only took a few minutes for us to descend to the bottom. We quickly located the wreck, and Quamus tugged on the shot-line to tell Walcott to feed us with compressed air.

I looked at Quamus through my blinkered face-mask. Physically, he was remarkably muscular, and in his wetsuit he looked as if he had been hewn out of solid granite. It was his eyes that interested me the most, though. Framed in his oval face-mask, they looked serious and reflective, as if life had passed him by so many times that no crisis could surprise him any longer; as if he were quite ready for death, whenever it eventually came. I wondered whether old man Evelith had been pulling my leg when he had told me that Quamus had been at Billington over a hundred years ago; I knew that some families gave their servants 'below-stairs' names, so that butler after butler was always called James, no matter what they had actually been christened. The Quamus who had given piggybacks to Duglass Evelith's father had probably been this Quamus' father.

The compressed air spurted out of the six-inch hose with a sudden wallop, and for a moment I almost lost my grip on it. There was a compensator on the hose which prevented any diver who was using it from being jet-propelled all around the sea-bed; but all the same it felt as if it had a life of its own, and after two or three minutes of blasting away at the silt on the bottom of the sea, my arms were aching and my back felt as if I had deputized for Lon Chancy in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

We worked almost blind, because of the dense clouds of silt which the airhose blew up all around us. On our second dive, we would use an airlift, which would clear most of the silt away, but on this dive Quamus had to break through the consolidated layer of grit and shell which lay beneath the first thin coating of silt and mud and 'anchorage gash' — that assorted refuse which you always find on the bottom of the sea wherever boats are moored. To break through, Quamus used a long metal rod with a sharpened end, and once I had blown away the initial mud, he began to hack at the grit with relentless energy.

We were surrounded by whirling debris: shell, mud, startled hermit-crabs, slipper limpets, clams, and grotesque sponges. I felt as if our underwater world had gone mad, an Alice-in-Wonderland turmoil of shellfish, silt, and bobbing Coca-Cola bottles. But after ten minutes' work, Quamus gripped my arm and squeezed it twice, which was our pre-arranged signal that the first dive was over. Quamus thrust his iron rod into the hole he had made, and marked it with a bright orange flag. Then he finned slowly up to the surface, and I followed him.

'How's it going?' asked Walcott, helping us onboard.

'You're kicking up enough mud down there.' He pointed to the surface of the bay, where a wide muddy stain was already spreading above the wreck.

'We're through to the lower layer of silt,' said Quamus, impassively, as Laurie helped him out of his oxygen-cylinders. 'We should be able to start work with the airlift now.'

'Anybody asked you what we're up to?' I said.

Walcott shrugged. 'A couple of fishermen came past and asked if I knew where they could sink their lines for the best flounder. So I sent them out to Woodbury Point.'

'They won't catch much flounder there,' said Quamus.

'Exactly,' said Walcott.

We rested for fifteen minutes or so, and then Laurie kitted us up with fresh oxygen cylinders and we prepared to go down again. It was almost twenty before ten now, and I was anxious that we should complete this dive as soon as possible. I didn't want the coastguard prowling around; nor did I want Edward or Forrest or Dan Bass to notice that Walcott's lugger was anchored right over the wreck of the David Dark . For all I knew, they might be planning to dive on the wreck themselves this morning, to put down markers before they registered it.

For a further half-hour, Quamus and I toiled away on the bottom of the sea, blowing away the silt from the side of the David Dark’s hull. At last, we saw dark encrusted timbers, and Quamus made the 'okay' sign to indicate that we were making good progress. With only three or four minutes of oxygen left, we completed a 20-foot deep scour-pit into the soft silt down beside the hull, which Quamus marked with his flag. Then he made the thumb's-up sign for 'surface'.

I turned around, giving a first strong kick of my fins, and to my horror I became entangled in something like wet white sheeting. I struggled and kicked against it, and as I did so I felt the soft bumping of swollen flesh inside it. It was the floating corpse of Mrs James Goult, which had somehow been drawn towards the wreck of the David Dark , either by the tidal stream, or by the air-suction work we had been doing on it, or by some other inexplicable magnetism.

Don't panic: I told myself. And I tried to remember what Dan Bass had told me, in my three lessons at Forest River Park. I reached for my knife, tugged it out, and tried to cut the floating wet shroud away from me. My blood thundered in my ears, and my breathing sounded like a railroad locomotive. I ripped through linen, cut through seams, but the fabric seemed to billow all around me and entangle me even more.

In total fright, I felt the corpse bump against me again, and its arms somehow wrap themselves around my legs, making it impossible for me to kick myself to the surface. At that same moment, with a squeaky sigh, my oxygen ran out, and I realized I had less than two minutes to make it up to the surface before I suffocated.