was ready to give up. “Oh, johnny, what does it all mean?”
“I know what it all means.” no question now but that I knew what
it all meant and wished to heaven I didn’t. I’d only thought i’d been
afraid before, the time i’d only been guessing. But the time for
guessing was past; oh, my god, it was past. I knew the truth now, and
the truth was worse than I had ever dreamed. I fought down the rising
panic and said steadily through dry lips, “have you ever robbed a grave,
susan?”
“Have I ever ” she broke off, and when her voice came again there
were tears in it. “We’re both worn out, johnny. Let’s get down below.
I want to go back to the sick bay.”
“I have news for you, susan. I’m not mad. But i’m not joking.
And I hope to god that grave’s not empty.” I caught her arm to lead her
away, and as I did the lightning flashed again and her eyes were wild
and full of fear. I wondered what mine looked like to her.
chapter 9
[thursday 10 p.m.-midnight]
what with the darkness, my bad leg, the intermittent lightning, the
wild rearing, wave-top staggering and plunging of the campari, and the
need to use the greatest caution all the way, it took us a good fifteen
minutes to reach number four hold, far back on the afterdeck and when we
got there, pulled back the tarpaulin, loosened a couple of battens, and
peered down into the near-stygian depths of the hold, I wasn’t at all
sure that I was glad we had come. Along with several tools i’d filched
an electric lantern from the bosun’s store on the way there, and though
it didn’t give off much of a light, it gave off enough to let me see
that the floor of the hold was a shambles. I’d secured for sea after
leaving carracio, but I hadn’t secured for a near-hurricane, for the
excellent reason that whenever the weather was bad the campari had
invariably run in the other direction.
but now carreras had taken us in the wrong direction and he either
hadn’t bothered or forgotten to secure for the worsening weather
conditions. Forgotten, almost certainly; for number four hold presented
a threat, to say the least, to the lives of everybody aboard, carreras
and his men included. At least a dozen heavy crates, the weight of one
or two of which could be measured in tons, had broken loose and were
sliding and lurching across the floor of the hold with every
corkscrewing pitch of the campari, alternately crashing into the secured
cargo aft or the bulkhead forward. My guess was that this wasn’t doing
the forward bulkhead any good, and just let the motion of the campari
change from pitching to rolling, especially as we neared the centre of
the hurricane, and the massive dead weights of those sliding crates
would begin to assault the sides of the ship. Buckled plates, torn
rivets, and a leak that couldn’t be repaired would be only a matter of
time.
to make matters worse, carreras’ men hadn’t bothered to remove the
broken, splintered sides of the wooden crates in which they and the guns
had been slung aboard; they, too, were sliding about the floor with
every movement of the ship, being continually smashed and becoming
progressively smaller in size as they were crushed between the sliding
crates and bulkheads, pillars and fixed cargo. Not the least
frightening part of it all was the din, the almost continuous
goose-pimpling metallic screech as iron-banded cases slid over steel
decks, a high-pitched grating scream that set your teeth on edge, a
scream that invariably ended, predictably yet always unexpectedly, in a
jarring crash that shook the entire hold as the crates brought up
against something solid. And every sound in that echoing,
reverberating, emptily cavernous hold was magnified ten times. All in
all, the floor of that hold wasn’t the place I would have chosen for an
afternoon nap.
I gave the electric lantern to susan, after shining it on a
vertical steel ladder tapering down into the depths of the hold.
“Down you go,” I said. “For heaven’s sake, hang on to that ladder.
There’s a baffle about three feet high at the bottom of it. Get behind
it. You should be safe there.”
I watched her climb slowly down, manoeuvred two of the battens back
into place over my head no easy job with one hand and left them like
that. Maybe they would be jarred loose; they might even fall down into
the hold. It was a chance I had to take; they could only be secured
from above. And the covering tarpaulin could also only be secured from
above. There was nothing I could do about that either. If anyone was
crazy enough to be out on deck that night especially as carreras had no
life lines rigged the chances were in that blinding storm they wouldn’t
even notice the flapping corner of the tarpaulin or, if they did, they
would only either pass it by or, at the most, secure it. If someone was
cunous enough to go to the length of pushing back a batten-well, there
was no point in worrying about that.
I went down the hatch slowly, awkwardly, painfully-marston had a
higher opinion of his anaesthetics than I had and joined susan on the
floor behind the baffle. At this level the noise was redoubled, the
sight of those head-high behemoths of crates charging across the hold
more terrifying than ever. Susan said, “the coffins, where are they?”
all I had told her was that I wanted to examine some coffins. I
couldn’t bring myself to tell her what we might find in them.
“They’re boxed. In wooden crates. On the other side of the hold.”
“The other side!” she twisted her head, lined up the lantern, and
looked at the sliding wreckage and crates screeching and tearing their
way across the floor. “The other side! we would-we would be killed
before we got halfway there.”
“Like enough, but I don’t see anything else for it. Hold
on a minute, will you?”
“You! with your leg! you can’t even hobble. Oh no!” before I
could stop her, she was over the baffle and half running, half
staggering across the hold, tripping and stumbling as the ship lurched
and her feet caught on broken planks of wood, but always managing to
regain balance, to stop suddenly or dodge nimbly as a crate slid her
way. She was agile, I had to admit, and quick on her feet, but she was
exhausted with seasickness, with bracing herself for the past hours
against the constant violent lurching of the campari; she’d never make
it.
but make it she did, and I could see her on the other side,
flashing her torch round. My admiration for her spirit was equailed
only by my exasperation at her actions. What was she going to do with
those boxed coffins when she found them, carry them back across the
floor, one under each arm?
but they weren’t there, for after she had looked everywhere she
shook her head. And then she was coming back and I was shouting out a
warning, but the warning stuck in my throat and was only a whisper and
she wouldn’t have heard it anyway. A plunging, careening crate,
propelled by a sudden vicious lurch as the campari plunged headlong into
an exceptional trough, caught her back and shoulder and pitched her to
the floor, pushing her along before its massive weight as if it were
imbued with an almost human inhumanuality of evil and malignance and
determined to crush the life out of her against the forward bulkhead.
And then, in the last second before she would have died, the campari
straightened, the crate screeched to a halt less than a yard from the
bulkhead, and susan was lying there between crate and bulkhead, very
still. I must have been at least fifteen feet away from her, but I have
no recollection of covering the distance from the baffle to where she
lay and then back again, but I must have done; for suddenly we were
there in a place of safety and she was clinging to me as if I were the
last hope left in the world.
“Susan!” my voice was hoarse, a voice belonging to someone else
altogether. “Susan, are you hurt?”
she clung even closer. By some miracle she still held the lantern
clutched in her right hand. It was round the back of my neck somewhere,
but the reflected beam from the ship’s side gave enough light to see by.
Her mask had been torn ff; her face was scratched and bleeding, her hair
a bedragled mess, her clothes soaked and her heart going like a captive
bird’s. For an incongruous moment an unbidden recolection touched my
mind, a recollection of a very cool, very poised, sweetly mallcious,