Graham Masterton - Death Trance

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 Walcott, 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 I 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.

'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 all.'

‘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.