Dennis Wheatley - They Found Atlantis

It was unfair—unjust to be cut off like this when life was only starting, Camilla felt, and impotent rage momentarily conquered her fear. Never again to admire her own beauty in the dressing-table glass while the maid did her hair. Never again to be able to display her supple rounded limbs, while sunbathing, to the admiration of all beholders. No more laughter, no more flirtations, no more joyous passionate love-making, but darkness—death—and decay. She thought of her exquisite, so carefully tended body, wasted, useless, rotting there, turned to a mass of putrescent stinking carrion, and sobbed afresh.

Aeons of time seemed to drift by while they sat huddled together motionless, their brains racing madly towards the borderland of insanity, or steeped almost to numbness now in blank despair.

The McKay glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist watch and announced: 'It's ten past one. We've been down here just on an hour.'

Nicky laughed, unnaturally, shrilly: 'It's cocktail time— cocktail time up there,' and they knew him to be on the verge of a breakdown.

'I've got a flask of brandy,' the McKay offered. 'I never go on any sort of risky business without one—here, have a pull at it if you like.' As he reached behind him in the darkness to hand over the flask he hoped that a good stiff peg might hold Nicky together for a little longer. He was dreading more than anything the time which must inevitably come when someone's nerve would snap.

'Thanks,' Nicky grabbed the flask gratefully and held it to his mouth.

'You poor dear,' Sally turned her head which was resting on the McKay's shoulder. She spoke normally again now. 'How right you were in trying to dissuade us from coming on these dives. You always foresaw that one of them would end in a tragedy. What rotten luck for you that just this one time you're with us should be the time the cable breaks.'

He shrugged. 'It can't be helped, m'dear. I'm lucky, con-siderin what I've been through, to reach the age I have— and anyhow I've had a lot of fun. It's yourself, and Camilla, and Vladimir and Nicky who're hardest hit. You're all young people who had a right to expect many happy years ahead.'

'You're a dear,' she murmured and snuggled closer to him.

Another hour drifted by while the lights of the luminous fishes came and went with monotonous regularity outside the ports. Inside the sphere they sat cramped yet motionless sunk in a hopeless apathy.

'I wonder,' said Count Axel meditatively, after he had asked, and been told, the time, 'I wonder how long will elapse before they find our bodies here?'

'From now till doomsday,' replied the McKay briefly.

'Oh no, my dear Captain, you are quite wrong. I should say fifty years at the utmost and it is possible that our human remains may be brought to the surface long before that.'

'Why should you think so?'

'Remember that before our unfortunate descent today the Doctor had already proved his theory to be correct. Slinger, Ardow, the telephonist Oscar, who has had a most fortunate escape by the way, and doubtless all the members of the crew, know that the remains of the Atlantean capital do really lie beneath them. This great discovery is now the property of the whole world; other, greater, bathyspheres with stronger cables will be built and new expeditions will find ready financial backing since that is always forthcoming when there are definite prospects of finding gold. Then the advance of science is so rapid these days, that every ruin in these waters will be mapped and examined They are bound to discover this rusty ball before they are done and it would not surprise me at all to learn—if I could see into the future—that before twenty years are past the sphere will be a greatly prized exhibit in some museum anc our bodies buried with considerable honour in-'

'Stop! cried Camilla wildly. 'Stop! How can you!'

'I am sorry Madame,' he apologised turning his head to smile in the darkness. 'I had hoped to distract your thoughts a little.'

'Don't, please,' she begged. 'It's bad enough as things are but to hear you calmly speculating on what may happen to our corpses will drive me out of my mind. Besides-'

'Besides what, Madame?' he prompted her.

'I've just remembered,' her voice went tremulous again. 'The Doctor warned us when we first went down that we should not talk too much, because the more we did the more—the more oxygen we used up.'

'I know, I hoped that you had forgotten that, because it had just occurred to me again. I was really trying to reduce our supply and, automatically, the time we still have to wait.'

'Camilla's right!' snapped Nicky, 'Camilla's right! For God's sake shut up.'

'I will,' agreed the Count—'since it is her wish.'

The silence was longer this time, so long that they almost seemed to have been asleep and suffering in some fantastic nightmare when the Doctor spoke:

'Nine out of our twelve tanks are used now.'

'Would it not be better if we made an end then?' Count Axel suggested again.

'No,' cried Nicky promptly. 'That's suicide and I won't have it. It may surprise you to know it but I'm religious in a kind of way. I don't mind telling you now it—it can't get any further but all that dope about my being an American and graduate of a swell college is sheer huey. I'm only half American through my mother and my father was North country English. I was born in a London slum. I ran away from home to better myself and I did by golly—but they were a religious pair and deep down in me their teaching stuck. We'll all have to go before the Judge's seat when the last trumpet sounds and that scares me more than the thought of death—I'll not add suicide to all the lying and cheating I've had to do to get up to where I got.'

'You're right, Boss—you said a mouthful,' Bozo came out of his coma and unexpectedly backed Nicky up. 'My folks was religious too—and what I've got to answer for's enough. Yes, Sir, I'm with you all the time.'

The McKay would have clung to his life like a limpet had there been the remotest hope of retaining it but, since they had to die, he preferred the Count's way out to the horror of madness and torture of suffocation. He too possessed deep religious convictions although he was not given to talking of them but the Doctor expressed his belief exactly when he said:

'I am no atheist. In fact I was educated for the Lutheran Church, ordained, and practised as a Minister until I was twenty-eight. Only my intense interest in archaeology and an offer of employment on an expedition to Assyria tempted me to resign from the Ministry; but I haf always believed that God's mercy has no limitations. I am unorthodox perhaps but I cannot think He would withhold his pardon from anyone who shortened their life by an hour or two when in such a hopeless predicament as ourselves.'

Camilla settled it. She began to scream and beg them frantically not to do anything—yet.

Vladimir declared jumpily that he would shoot anyone who attempted to go against Camilla's wishes, and they settled down again to wait for death in grim silence.

The atmosphere was so tense that they could almost feel each other thinking. Sally had not spoken for a long time now and a shivering fit took possession of her. The McKay felt her slim body trembling beneath his arm and once more he racked his brains for some way to comfort her.

'Look here,' he said suddenly. 'I'm no story teller but oxygen or no oxygen I'm going to tell you a story m'dear. It's the only one I can think of at the moment because my old brain's gone woolly, and you'll have heard it years ago but if you'll listen a bit maybe it will give you something to think about.'

The others turned towards him in the darkness and he began:

'Once upon a time there were three sisters, or rather two of them were sisters and the other was a stepsister if I remember. Anyhow two of them were much older than the other one and they were both very ugly, and lazy and bad tempered, while the youngest was a beautiful young girl like you.