Three Novels of Creeping Terror: The Night Boat, Baal, and Bethany's Sin

Three Novels of Creeping Terror

The Night Boat, Baal, and Bethany’s Sin

Robert McCammon

The Night Boat

Robert R. McCammon

Author’s Note

It may be interesting to note that U-boats were referred to by both captains and crews as Iron Coffins. Rightly so; 736 German submarine crews still lie with their boats on the ocean floor.

R.R.M.

For my mother, who helped me

find that special island

God, how the dead men

Grin by the wall,

Watching the fun

Of the Victory Ball.

—Alfred Noyes,

A Victory Dance

Evil … has infinite forms.

—Blaise Pascal,

Pensees

Prologue

CLOUDS SWEPT ACROSS THE yellow oval of the moon, one moment obscuring it, the next opening chasms so that its ocher light could stream down upon the plain of black ocean beneath. The moon hung motionless, while around it the clouds roiled. It was as if they possessed a life of their own, whirling upon themselves, breaking into pieces and attaching themselves, leechlike, onto others. They were first the maws of fantastic monsters, then men’s faces with mouths open and screaming, then bare, bleached skulls shattered slowly into fragments by the Caribbean winds.

There were two lights panning across the surface of the sea—one high, over a dark mass of land, flashing intermittently, and the other floating low, just above the stern of a rusty-hulled American freighter hauling eight thousand tons of raw sulfur.

And one hundred yards beyond the freighter’s wake was something else.

Quietly and smoothly a dark cylinder of iron rose up from the depths on a slender tower. The metal had been painted black to avoid reflection, the viewing lens sheathed in concrete—a single freezing eye.

The periscope turned, the only noise betraying its presence a soft hissssss of foam rushing around the tower; it sighted the island beacon, paused a few seconds, and turned several degrees to study the specter of the merchant vessel. Moonlight glittered off railings, off porthole rims, off the glass in an upper-deck wheelhouse.

Easy prey.

The periscope descended. A gurgle of water and gone.

Then, with a noise like the death threat of a striking serpent, the first G7A concussion torpedo, loaded with eight hundred pounds of explosive, left its forward tube. Powered by compressed air, it left a thin trail of silvery bubbles on its course toward the freighter’s stern. It moved with a fluid grace, a smaller replica of the huge machine that had borne it across six thousand miles of ocean. Gradually it rose to within ten feet of the surface and hurtled onward toward its rendezvous.

When the torpedo slammed into the freighter’s screws, it ripped open a gash below the waterline with an explosion that lit the sea with fire and fury. There was a long scream of iron as ton after ton of sea broke open the freighter’s stern plates. Then there came a second explosion, hotter and redder than the first, sending up a gout of heavy black smoke through which burning men leaped over the shattered deck railing for the sea. Flame spread along the lower deck, greedily chewing its way toward the wheelhouse. A third explosion; a spray of metal and timbers tossed into the sky. Shuddering, the freighter veered toward the beacon light less than a mile away. The captain did not fully realize what had happened. He was perhaps thinking that they had struck something underwater: a reefhead, a sunken wreck. He did not know the screws were mangled and useless or that the fires were already out of control; he did not know the great shafts of the diesel engines had been thrown forward by the blast, grinding men to bloody pulps before them.

When the second torpedo hit, just to starboard of the first strike, the explosion collapsed the stern section of the lower deck. Supports shattered and fell away, and men struggling blindly through smoke and flame were crushed beneath tons of iron. The entire superstructure trembled and began to cave in.

Bulkheads moaned, split, burst as the sea gnawed its way through; iron crumpled like waxed paper; men clawed at each other as they sank, drowning. Some, above decks, were quickly burned into stiffened crisps. The dying ship, filled with the hideous racket of screams and moans, of shattering timber and glass, lurched sharply to starboard and began to sink rapidly at the stern.

A red emergency flare was fired from the remains of the burning wheelhouse; it exploded in the sky with a sharp crack and floated lazily back down toward the sea. Black smoke churned over the freighter, becoming thicker and thicker, filling the air with the stench of scorched iron and burned flesh, until finally it turned the moon ebon.

The surface of the sea began to part beyond the freighter’s fiery shape. A rush of swirling white foam marked the ascent of the hunter. Its periscope tower broke the surface, then the rectangular shape of the conning tower appeared, and finally its superstructure, which gleamed as the sea ran off it in red-reflecting streams. The U-boat began to move nearer its victim, its bow slicing cleanly through a carnage of bodies and timber, crates, pieces of railing, ship’s furniture. Here a man holding a bleeding comrade and calling out for help, here another in a blackened life jacket, raising up the bloody stumps that had been his arms. A sheen of oil had spread across the sea from the freighter’s ruptured tanks, and it too was afire. Flames reflected off the iron hull of the U-boat, burned in the eyes of the men who watched from the conning tower’s bridge, glowed in the submarine commander’s wolflike eyes.

"Ja. A good hit, he said over the noises of the explosions. It had been ten minutes since the second torpedo left its tube. The freighter was doomed. Die, he said very softly to the floating blanket of debris and the mass of the sinking ship. Die."

The black smoke, carrying the scent of death with it, drifted around the U-boat in heavy swirls. Through it the commander could hear a final, long shriek as the freighter headed for the bottom. This was deep water, a thousand feet or more, a trench surrounded by steeply sloping coral reef and sand walls. He cocked his head, listening to a loud gurgling and bubbling of water, the hissing of steam, the half-crazed outcries of drowning men. This was a symphony to him, the almost overpowering music of destruction. He narrowed his eyes and moved his gaze to an object floating off the port bow. It was a life preserver. All slow, he said, speaking into the voice tube that relayed his orders to the control room. The ring would bear the freighter’s name and possibly the registry number; he was fastidious about keeping his leather-bound war diary accurate. Schiller, he said to the lean blond man who stood nearest him. You and Drexil get that ring for me.

The two crewmen clambered down the conning-tower ladder to the deck and began to move forward, careful of their footing on the slippery, algae-slimed wood.

The U-boat’s bow pushed through a mass of blazing wreckage. Somewhere a man was calling out for God, over and over again; the voice died away abruptly, as if the man’s throat had filled with water. Hanging on to the port-deck railing, the oily, littered sea washing around their ankles, the two sailors waited, watching the preserver carried toward them by the waves. Three more of the choppy swells and it would be close enough to grasp by hand. The commander watched, hands folded before him, as Drexil, with Schiller holding his legs, reached over to get it.

And then there was a high, piercing noise that made the commander whirl around. His eyes widened. The noise, coming from the midst of the black smoke, rose until it became a metallic shriek. From the open tower hatch the exec’s black-bearded face emerged, his mouth a silent O. At once the commander understood. A battle-station siren. A subchaser, coming up fast on their stern. He roared into the voice tube, CRASH DIVE! CRASH DIVE! even as the U-boat’s alarm bells shrilled below. Then a second shrieking siren: a second subchaser joining the first. Both of them roaring full-speed, bearing down on the U-boat. The exec dropped through the hatchway, and the commander peered anxiously out across the bulwark. His sailors had the preserver and were frantically making their way through the deepening black troughs.

A bright circular light hit the sea just across the U-boat’s bow, and now the sea vibrated with the noise of the subchasers’ engines. With a muffled thud a geyser of water rose up to starboard of the conning tower, followed by an explosion that almost tore through the eardrums. The sea heaved around them.

The commander looked into the spotlight, his eyes aching from its brightness, his teeth clenched. Schiller and Drexil would not make the bridge in time. Without a second glance, he threw himself into the yawning hatch and sealed the lid shut over his head.

Like a huge reptilian beast, the great gleaming U-boat slid without hesitation into the depths. The two sailors, floundering in rising water, felt iron and wood drop away beneath their feet. They clutched at a railing, screaming out, focused in the eye of the light.

THE RING! Schiller shouted to his mate. HOLD ON TO IT!

But then a churn of white water tore it from Drexil’s grasp, and it skittered away into the flames. Schiller opened his mouth to cry out, seeing the conning tower sink away, passing him like a descending monster’s fin, but salt water streamed into his throat and he almost choked. He kicked forward, trying to grasp hold of the periscope tower, but as he did his leg slammed against something, and he felt himself being pulled down. He jerked at the leg, jerked again; it was useless. Something had caught his ankle and was pulling him after the boat. The sea blinded him, closing over his head. Get free! he heard himself shriek. Get free! The currents enveloped him, carrying him down. He cried out, air bursting from between his teeth, and wrenched at the leg. It came free at last, but there was a sharp cracking noise and pain almost overcame him. He fought his way to the surface. Stroke! the mind commanded the failing body. Stroke!

Schiller found himself amidst a maelstrom of noise and foaming sea. The sky was filled with the smell of cordite and the spinning red and green comets of flares. Shells were dropping all around him, hammering at his brain, and through the nightmare he grasped on to an empty crate and wrapped both arms around it.

When Schiller cleared his eyes he saw Drexil’s head bobbing only a few yards away. He cried out, DREXIL! HOLD ON! and began swimming, his leg a useless appendage. In another moment he realized he was weak and growing weaker, that he could not tread water, and land was too distant. There was something stringy, like dark clumps of jellyfish, in the waves. Gouts of blood. Intestines. Brains. Bodies torn to pieces. The offal of war. He reached Drexil and it was only when he took the man’s shoulder that he realized this man had black hair, and Drexil’s had been red.

The corpse, floating in a tattered life jacket, had no face.

White teeth grinned from a pulp of tissues and membranes and nerve fibers. Schiller shouted hysterically and pulled his hands back as if they had been contaminated. He began swimming into the green-glowing ocean, the fires still burning around him, but he was swimming without direction. Ahead was a solid plain of flame, and in the midst of the flame he could see the blackened, shriveled corpses, whirling around and around as if they were spinning above a gigantic whirlpool. He could feel the power of the water over the freighter wrenching at him. He tried to move away from it, but the sea had him and was pulling him down, and he couldn’t swim anymore. He wondered where Drexil was and if there were a true peace in death. He lowered his head and opened his mouth to fill his lungs before he went down.

Hands grasped him. Pulled him up from the surface. Threw him down into the bottom of a boat. Men standing over him, peering down.

Schiller blinked, could not make out their faces, could not move his body.

A live one, someone said, in English.

One

SOMETHING LAY AHEAD, DARK against the thick blue-green swells.

David Moore reached back and cut the sputtering motor. The sharp, hot sun lay across his bare back and shoulders like a bright tropical jacket. The battered fisherman’s skiff slowed, rolled lazily across the next swell, and Moore turned the tiller so whatever was in the water would come up on his starboard side. Squinting from the glare of sun off sea, he reached over the gunwale and brought the object up.

It was another piece of timber—God only knew where it had drifted or been torn from. It was a new piece, though, not yet gnarled and aged by the salt water, and he placed it in the bottom of the boat to examine it. On one side there were the remnants of red-painted letters against a white background. An S and an A. Salty? Sally? Samantha? It was evidently a shard of a boat’s transom, perhaps one of the Coquina boats, perhaps one that had drifted from a long way off. He knew the names of most of the island’s fishing fleet: Jolly Mack, Kinkee, Blue Lady, Lucy J. Leen, Gallant, a dozen others. This boat had probably been destroyed in some distant harbor or maybe it was one of the unfortunates caught in the teeth of the tropical storm that had screamed across the island three days previously. Some fisherman might have lost his life clinging to this boat, Moore thought, staring at the plank. He didn’t want to think about that. It brought up too many bad memories.

He started the motor again and swung the tiller so that the skiff’s prow was aimed at a point directly into the opening of Kiss Bottom Reef some forty yards ahead. The sea was still fairly rough, somewhat jumpin’ as the Caribbean fishermen said, and as he neared the reef passage the swells struck hard against the hull. There was debris all around: more splintered timbers, driftwood that might be worth salvaging, tree branches, roof tiles, even a rusted tin placard that read COLA, BEER, WINE. He had seen it ripped off the front of the Landfall Tavern from his hotel terrace. The sign had spun high across the island roofs and had been tossed in a wild, rain-swept spiral into the sea. As Moore passed through the channel he could see the ragged edges of the reef, stubbled with brown and green coral growths, just grazing the surface. A lot of boats had been torn open by those treacherous devil’s-horns, and had had to be dragged off to be patched up at the island’s boatyard or to die in deeper water. Outside the reef were two clangers, brightly painted orange buoys that banged and rattled as they were jostled together by the rough currents.

Moore steered between them, following the path of blue-green water before him, and then he headed toward the deeper, almost purple sea in the distance. It was still shallow just off Kiss Bottom—thirty to thirty-five feet—but the sand and coral bottom quickly shelved off into what was respectfully and fearfully known as the Abyss.

Moore turned in his seat and glanced back at the island he’d just steered from to get a correct bearing. The dark, tire-lined piers, the fishermen’s cluster of tinderbox shanties, the village of Coquina with its houses and shops of stucco brilliantly painted in wild reds, oranges, pale pinks, blues, browns, light greens. In the white sunlight the colors were dazzling. He let his eyes move up the island, where High Street left Coquina village and wound its way, on a path of ruts and gravel, to a small dark-blue structure with a white gabled roof and white wrought-iron terraces overlooking the harbor. The Indigo Inn was his hotel; he’d made the purchase three years before from an elderly man who was moving back to the States. In the last few days Moore and Markus, his handyman, had been busy replacing broken windows, shattered porch railing slats, and shutters that had been ripped away by the high winds. They did a patchwork job replacing things that had been broken before and would surely be broken again. In the islands, decay was the only certainty.

He turned out from land and steered toward the deeps, searching the water around him. Most of the debris had been washed ashore in the previous few days and whatever was still usable had been gathered up by the islanders. The storm had been a particularly fierce one even for September, one of the most furious of months during the autumn hurricane season. It had blown in from the east, almost unheralded except for the ominously yellow sky. Smashing first into the Coquina harbor, sending boats flying against the piers, the storm had torn a few of the fishermen’s dwellings to pieces, then screamed into the interior jungle, uprooting palms and shrubs, and miraculously veered around the shanty village of Caribville on the island’s northern point before finally heading out to sea again. The few radios that were the island’s sole method of communication had been knocked out by electrical interference. It was a wonder there had been so few serious injuries: only a few broken bones and lacerations, which had been tended by Dr. Maxwell at the clinic.

The sea darkened under his boat. The squat stone tower of the Carib Point beacon lay over his shoulder, a sighting point still used on stormy, wild nights to aid merchant freighters out in the channel. Since it lay near the Carib settlement, it had been allowed to fall into a state of near-ruin. Moore corrected his course a few degrees. In another few moments he was in the right spot; the beacon was just over his left shoulder and the tin-roofed structures of the boatyard drydock shelters over his right. He cut the motor, went to the bow, and heaved a lightweight grapple anchor over the side, allowing the rope to coil out from a hand-winch reel. When the line stopped, he knew that he’d been correct; he was in about fifty feet of water, at the very rim of the Abyss, where the bottom suddenly dropped off into infinity.

Moore moved back to get his diving gear and tank in the stern. He sat down, almost comforted by the skiffs slow rocking, and took off his khaki slacks and thongs. He wore dark-blue bathing briefs underneath, and he pulled a thin cotton T-shirt over his shoulders to guard against strap-burn. When he’d turned on his tank’s air supply, he hoisted the tank to his shoulders and strapped it on securely. Then he looked out across the Abyss.

In the distance he could see the faint shapes of far-off land masses: Chocolate Hole, Sandy Cay, Starfish Cay. They were much smaller than Coquina—mainly long spits of hot, palm-edged beaches—and of the three nearest, only Chocolate Hole was really a village. It was a tiny settlement of only fifty or so people who made their living selling green sea-turtles to the bulky industry boats that dealt in local island products. Here, out in the open, the breeze was strong and warm on Moore’s face. He let his eyes wander the plain of purple water above the great depths.

Only a few fishermen sailed here; they generally stayed nearer Coquina or fished for albacore and jacks in the shallow waters to the south. The Abyss was a haunted place, so the old islanders—the superstitious ones—said. A score of them had sworn they’d seen or heard things out here. There were those who’d been vehement: a great blazing ghost freighter, burning with a spectral emerald fire, in the midst of the Abyss, water hissing all around her, the moans of her doomed crew carrying out into dawn’s twilight. Though Moore was a man who made up his own mind about such things, he was sometimes inclined to believe it wasn’t just bad rum or Red Stripe beer talking. Not from the looks some of those men had in their eyes.

But now, in the clear afternoon sunlight, with the entire sky a huge unbroken canopy of hot blue, he could not believe in ghosts. At least, not sailing the surface.

When Moore looked into a mirror, he saw first his father’s eyes, as blue as the Caribbean depths themselves, crackling with intelligence and caution. He had let his beard grow when he reached the islands from Europe, and by the time he’d stepped off a tramp steamer onto Coquina’s shore he was a hard-muscled, tanned, and lean figure with black hair that curled around his collar, and a dark beard and mustache. He would be thirty-four in November, but he was light-years away from the life he’d led in Baltimore, his birthplace. No one in Baltimore—no one who remained in the life he’d left behind—could have recognized him, except perhaps by his eyes. He was a different man entirely, no longer the one who’d been a rising young executive in his father’s bank; who’d lived in a modest if expensive home in a fashionable Baltimore suburb with his wife, Beth, and eight-year-old son, Brian; who’d fought for a membership at the Amsterdam Hills Country Club; who’d owned a beautiful, teak-decked sailing sloop, custom-built by a Canadian firm, that he and Beth had christened—with champagne and all—Destiny’s Child. In those days he had worn the uniform, dark-blue or gray suits with regimental-striped ties, to quiet business luncheons and discussions in oak-paneled drawing rooms where he had struggled to stifle his yawning and restless unease.

He slipped into his black swim fins, strapped a sheathed knife around the calf of his right leg, then secured a weight-belt to his waist. Putting on a pair of gauntlet gloves, Moore rinsed out his mask with seawater, spat into it to prevent it from fogging, and then rinsed it out again. He eased the mask down over his face, put the regulator mouthpiece between his teeth, sucked and exhaled to make certain it was clear, then flipped himself backward over the gunwale in an easy, practiced motion.

Below, in the great room with light-blue walls streaming with sunlight, he waited for his bubbles to clear, watching the rise and fall of the hull above him. When he had adjusted to his underwater world, Moore swam toward the bow, found the taut anchor line and began to follow it hand-over-hand into the depths, his breath appearing before him in crystal globes that ascended to the surface. He went slowly, clearing his ears by squeezing his nostrils shut and blowing every few seconds. In another moment he sighted the bottom, ridges of sand and high walls of tangled coral, and he let go, kicking smoothly away, when he came to the end of the anchor line. Following the bottom, he swam toward the curtain of blue before him, his legs doing all the work, his arms held loosely at his sides. Familiar sights told him he was in the right place: the bulbous mass of brown brain coral that had amazed him the first time he’d seen it; magnificent forest of staghorn coral, now filled with the dart and shimmer of dwarf herring; an angelfish, strikingly blue and yellow, moving gracefully past him.

Through thick clumps of algae that stirred with the currents below, Moore saw a brigade of crabs on the march, freezing solid when they sensed his movement. The reefs were alive; fish flew like birds through the coral openings or whisked themselves into holes to await his passing. The reef dwellers were too accustomed to the predators to take any chances. A shadow covered him, and he looked up. Thirty feet above an eagle ray swam, the wings rippling like beautiful muscle. It vanished into the blue gloom.

Moore had been angling down as the bottom dropped away, and now he faced a wall of gnarled dark coral. He swam through a maze of sea fans, then rose above the wall and stopped abruptly.

Beneath him stretched the Abyss: dark, forboding. The sea turned from blue to black in those depths, like the huge mouth of something waiting to devour him. Though he’d been prepared, the sight of it sent an electric chill through him. Abruptly the vision of the ghost ship, lit by moonlight, glowing green and iridescent, came to him. He brushed it away. If ghosts did exist, Moore thought, they probably were down in that awesome hole. He glanced up at the silvery surface, then thought of the brass ship’s compass he’d found last year and began to descend.

There was a freighter down there somewhere, Moore knew; probably so deep his lungs would explode before he could ever reach it. It had gone down sometime in a battle during World War II—that was all he could glean from the stories that floated about the island. Details were sketchy, and no one here really liked to talk about the war. He had gone diving in this area the year before, after another fierce storm, and had discovered a ledge littered with pieces of metal, railings, even the bow portion of a shattered lifeboat. On that dive Moore had found an old ship’s compass, the glass missing but the brass still shining. He had taken the compass back to the inn, but when he’d returned to the Abyss a few days afterward the sand had settled back like a flat white carpet, and nothing remained. Another storm had hit soon after, but he hadn’t had the chance to dive again, so he’d had to wait for the following season in hopes of finding something else he might be able to salvage.

He continued downward. Where’s that ledge? he wondered suddenly, trying to pierce the deep-blue mist. It’s dropped away entirely. But then it materialized and he reached it, swimming along a high ridge of rock-dappled sand. There was something metal a few feet ahead: a rusted can. He picked it up. It was still sealed, though badly dented. He let it fall, swam on. In the midst of clumps of coral, probably ripped from the reef at the Abyss rim, there were shards of timber and more cans which gleamed brightly. He held one up and saw himself reflected in the scoured metal. It had been buried. Food supplies for that freighter’s crew? he wondered. Maybe. What would be inside? Peaches? Vegetables? He wondered if out of curiosity he should open one to see what was included in a 1942 merchant seaman’s diet.

The Abyss stretched down beneath him like the empty socket of a huge eye; there was a series of ledges, all sand choked with rock at various depths, one beneath the other until they faded from sight. One of them, a massive Mt. Everest of sand, caught his eye. It had a definite shape, but he couldn’t determine what it reminded him of. Moore descended, intrigued by the mound; he hadn’t noticed it before, but then his attention had been on an upper ledge, not the lower ones. He was perhaps ten feet above it when he realized something was protruding from the mass of sand and rock; his heart began to beat more rapidly.

Moore hovered over it, fanning the sand back with quick motions of his fins. The top of a cylinder of some kind protruded vertically. He felt it gingerly. Iron. Unmarked by marine growth, the object, like the cans, had been completely covered over by sand. There was glass in it, very heavily scarred. What in God’s name? he wondered. He reached down and pulled at it, only half-expecting it to come free; it wouldn’t budge. Moore began to dig the sand away from the object, then wrenched again at it. No use, David old cock, he told himself. This—whatever—is stuck tight. He checked his wristwatch. Time to head for the surface. But this cylinder: the scars of sand abrasion glinting, the glass inset. Fascinating as hell. It could be something worthwhile, he thought. Or perhaps … he gazed down at the sand stirred by his every movement.

Or perhaps something was buried beneath it.

Moore unstrapped his knife from its sheath and dug rocks away from the cylinder’s base. He uncovered more iron, gleaming and pitted, an inch at a time. Digging in wrist deep, he pulled the sand away in handfuls. He pried the rocks loose with his blade and let them roll off into that deep hole below him. Another glance at the watch. Time to go! But he was functioning like a machine now, digging and lifting, slowly uncovering what appeared to be a thick, gleaming iron support for that cylinder. There were no growths; it had been buried here for a long time. His knife scraped across flat rock and he shifted his digging to another section.

And then he froze. Forgot to exhale, then exhaled, the bubbles rattling toward the surface over a hundred and fifty feet above.

He had heard something, muffled and far away, like iron being hammered underwater.

Moore waited, his heart pounding, but the noise didn’t come again. What was it? He looked around and then realized something very odd: he hadn’t seen any fish at this depth. Very odd, in waters teaming with snapper, grouper, jacks, albacore. Moore glanced up, looking for the reassuring distant glow of the sun. There were remnants of jagged rock hanging over him, as if what had once been a ledge just above had given way. He tried to quiet the inner voices. Get to your boat, they whispered. Something is wrong here.

Where were the damned fish?

He continued digging, lifting out coral clumps.

The sand completely obscured his vision, like the roil of white clouds; it had to be extremely deep here, he thought. A mountain of sand and below him the valley of darkness. He plunged in his hands, the fingers closing around a rock, and pulled it out from the mound. When he did, sand cascaded in sheets off the sides of the mountain and on into the Abyss.

Then Moore saw something exposed a few feet away from the strange cylinder and the iron tower. He pulled at the new object. It was a large barrel of some kind, also made of scarred, dented metal. He freed it and it began to slide down the sand slope, and as he clung to it he saw the detonation cap of the device, and the chill of fear raised hair on the back of his neck.

It was an unexploded depth charge.

Moore wrenched his hands back as if they’d been burned. His tank clanged sharply against coral debris, and he fought his way up the mountain away from it, his fins churning water. He could see himself turned inside out by the thing’s blast, his body reduced to a mass of bloody shreds. Then the predators would come, and there would be nothing left. He half-sank into the sand, fought himself free in a blinding mist, looking back over his shoulder to see the forgotten charge pitch off the ledge. Then it began to fall into the depths, spinning end over end. Moore reached the summit; the charge had vanished into the dark mists and he stared fearfully after it, praying that if it did explode it would go off hundreds of feet below, where the shock might not kill him. Otherwise …

And then there was a burst of white light far below. The shock came roaring out of the depths, an undersea whirlwind that reached inside him, through the flesh, gripping the bones and twisting.

He gritted his teeth against the pain and roaring noise that almost shattered his eardrums; a fissure split open in the sand, releasing a pulsating globe of air that tore past him and rocketed up toward the surface. The blast echoed all around, the water crazily shifting in all directions, trying to rip him to pieces. The sand parted, cracked open in a dozen seams. It slid under him; an avalanche of it covered Moore and he fell backward, toppling toward the wild Abyss, his tank slamming against coral. Great bubbles of air were roaring all around him, some of them ripping their way free of the sand. Something struck him like the blow of a fist; his mask was torn from his face and the water blinded him. When he felt for a grip, frantically, his hands closed around a solid object. He held on, the currents twisting at him, the noise a throbbing pain at his temples. And then a realization came to him that almost caused him to shout out in terror: he was rising.

There was a shudder beneath him, and through the blue-green distortion he saw a dark, massive shape towering above him. His lungs were filling; he was rising too quickly. He let go his grip and kicked out with his fins against a hard surface that slid past him. He was thrown away from the thing, twisted and turned and mauled by the fierce currents, lost in the explosion of sand and sea. When he could see again he was looking toward the surface into the sun.

Or where the sun had been.

For now it was obscured by the huge shape; the thing was rising to the surface, trailing sand; its shadow covered him, and he felt lost in its darkness. He watched it, eyes stinging. The shape broke through the surface in a roil of foam, and through the ringing in his ears he heard the thunder of sea surging against iron. It hung there, rocking slowly from side to side.

Get up! Moore screamed to himself. No, no. Control. Control. He swam furiously out of the thing’s ominous shadow and began to stroke very slowly for the top. He had been thrown almost to the rim of the Abyss, and he concentrated on following the slope of the shelving bottom. He found his anchor line, pulled the anchor free and began to climb. He stopped for decompression at ten feet, watching the hull of his skiff being battered by the waves. When his head finally broke water, he spat out his mouthpiece and hung on to the skiff’s gunwale, staring at what lay not more than thirty yards from him.

Dear God, he whispered.

Its hull was over two hundred feet long; red sunlight had settled into splices in the iron flesh, like the bleeding wounds of a giant saurian. Water foamed around a sharp, evil-looking prow. Remnants of an iron railing hung twisted over the side, partly submerged; there were long dents and gashes in the superstructure and in the bulwark of a conning tower. Moore could hear the sea hissing against its sides.

A submarine.

One of the old World War II types, with a flat deck and a hungry-for-battle look about it. It seemed to be a monstrous predator reawakened, eager for prey.

Moore hung from the skiff’s gunwale, unable to think what he should do. And as he watched, he saw the bow of the thing begin to turn. The currents had it now, shoving against its mass. Alive again, the submarine began to move slowly and inexorably toward the island of Coquina.

Two

WHEN MASON HOLCOMBE PICKED up his next card he knew Lady Luck with her shining golden hair and dress of crackling folding money was standing at his right shoulder. He tried to keep the look of the barracuda out of his eyes, but it was damned hard to do. He had a pair of queens and triple jacks; he raised his eyes very carefully … oh, mon, he told himself, do keep that look innocent!… to Percy Pudge Layne, who sat across from him at the up-ended, rusted fuel drum they used as a card table. Percy, a rotund black with a high forehead and close-set oval eyes, regarded him in silence.

Come on, mon! said Mason carefully, trying to affect an off-handed aggravation. How many cards?

Three. He tossed the three down, took another three off the top of a dog-eared pack that had been used in boatyard games for as long as both men could remember.

Okay, what you puttin’ up? Mason said, ready to get on with it.

Percy shook his head, his face wrinkled up and worried. He gazed out across Mason’s broad shoulder at the plain of the sea beyond, then dropped his eyes back to his hand. Without a word he reached beside him to a pack of cigarettes that had been broken in half. He put four halves before him.

Fine. Mason put out his four cigarette halves, raked out three more. And three.

Percy shrugged, met the raise.

What you got, my fine friend? Mason asked, ready to leap.

Not so good, I doan think, said the other man. He laid down his cards in a fan shape. You can beat that, I know. Before him on the drum were two aces, two wild deuces, and a six.

Mason sat, numb from the neck up. He dropped his cards down. Percy laughed out loud and took the cigarette halves to add to a growing heap. Came up lucky as all hell on that draw, he said quietly.

I ain’t playing no more with these old cards! Mason said. You can just damned see through the back of ’em! Jesus Christ!

Oh shaddup, Percy said, and lay down your ante.

The afternoon breeze off the sea was cool and fresh. It was a welcome relief to get out here when the sun was high, away from the heat of the wharfs and the stench of fuel oil, grease, and battery acids. They could hear the banging of a hammer against timber and the drawing of a handsaw repeated over and over again—someone still working in the boatyard. Probably J.R., or the foreman, Lenny, burning themselves up in that sun to finish replacing the Ginger’s broken hull planks. The old man who operated her, Harless, or Hairless, as the boatyard men called him, was a good friend of the yard’s owner, Kevin Langstree, and so that accounted for the rush that had been put into the repair work.

The Langstree boatyard had seen better days. It was a jumble of wharf pilings, huts, piles of timber and empty oil drums, crates and boxes strewn everywhere, heavy ropes coiled like thick brown pythons, and a morass of bald tires stacked up to protect the hulls of boats. It had been affluent once, bustling with traffic from the island harbor, an anchorage for both British and American freighters. Now it was kept up primarily to service the island’s fishing fleet and to do repair work if necessary on the yachts that cruised through here during the tourist season. The work force had been cut to a third of what it had been during the early part of World War II, when the boatyard was paid handsomely for repairs made on the huge Allied warships that had fought the Germans in the Caribbean. In those days, as the aging Langstree liked to tell everyone, the boatyard had worked fifty men on two shifts; the work was plentiful and hard but the men knew what they were doing. They were all tough, muscular islanders with a common-sense, natural knowledge of both the small fishing trawlers and the larger, more complex steel-hulled craft. They had learned the art of fast patching, of making use of available materials until what had seemed hopeless was again ready for the sea. They could take down and put back together ocean-going diesels blindfolded, restore the snapped rudders and broken hulls of sailing sloops, rebuild skiffmotors by spit and wire.

But no more. Many of those men had moved away from Coquina in search of better-paying jobs after the war had ended; some of them had died in action, for a boatyard servicing warships in a combat zone was a prime target for the enemy. Now most of the yard was abandoned. Of two tin-roofed wooden structures used as drydocks only one was in use, and that only occasionally when a larger boat needed a patch job or some such serious work. The other, allowed to fall to pieces in the salt air, had been constructed by the British navy for the purpose of storing damaged warships until they could either be patched or until the heavy naval tugs could arrive for them; it was filled with supplies and equipment left over when the warships were no longer needed to patrol the Caribbean. Although the jobs had dried up, the boatyard had always maintained a proud reputation and was the only thing that kept Coquina on the map. Most of the workmen made ends meet for their families by moonlighting either as fishermen or farmers.

Deal, Percy said over the noise of the hammer. He glanced across; the bulkheadlike doorway to the nearest drydock had been opened and he could see J.R.’s head as the man worked in the concrete-reinforced pit. Beside the shelter were the bleaching bones of an abandoned ketch, its splintered hull as white as the grass-thatched sand around it. A few dozen yards away, beneath a block-and-tackle assembly, were the wharfs, where a couple of fishing boats were moored. A sign on long stilts at the far end of the wharfs, facing the sea, read in weather-beaten red paint: LANGSTREE BOATYARD.

Percy was not really concentrating as the cards were placed face-down before him. He was looking out at the sea. He had watched the little skiff with the white man in it move on through the bommies of Kiss Bottom, and while he and Mason played he gazed curiously out at the Abyss, where the skiff, only a white dot against the blueness of sea and sky, floated at anchor. He wondered what the white man was doing there. In the middle of the sea, beneath that searing orb of sun! Moore had to be crazy as hell. Even he, Percy, with his black flesh thickened by years of outdoor work, avoided the early afternoon heat, preferring instead to play poker beneath the shading palm fronds or drink beer and swap old stories with the other men up at the Landfall.

He picked up his hand. Four and six of clubs, heart’s king, ten of hearts, and ace of diamonds. What to discard, what to build on? He suddenly felt like a fool sitting here. He had nets to mend for the next morning’s fishing. Without them he’d have to depend on trawling lines, and he didn’t want to. The fish were getting too smart to grab just any old bait these days, and the huge nets on the industry boats that worked these waters on an erratic basis frightened away the fish that weren’t scooped up. Damn it, he thought angrily, it’s gettin’ tough for a man to feed his own mouth, much less a wife’s and two children’s.

What you want, mon? Mason asked him.

And when the other man looked up, intending to ask for three cards, his gaze froze.

The sea was boiling like a hot cauldron out in the Abyss, just beyond where Moore’s skiff lay. Percy could see the great turbulence of it. Something was wrong. Bad wrong. He dropped his cards, rose up from the battery crates he’d been perched upon. He pointed. What the hell’s that?

Mason twisted around, narrowed his eyes. Jesus, he said, quietly.

The men could see foam crashing over the skiff; it was jerked down the side of a wave, then bobbed back into view again. And as they watched, spellbound, they saw a massive shape burst from the sea in a white geyser of water. They thought at first it was a whale emerging from the depths but then the sun glinted sharply off what appeared to be a hard surface; the thing rocked back and forth as the ocean continued to churn around it.

Damn! Mason said, leaping up from his seat. He put a hand across his forehead to shield his eyes from the reflection and stared.

J.R.! Percy shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. The hammering ceased and a man appeared at the shelter entrance. GET OUT HERE QUICK!

On the Abyss rim, Moore clung to the skiff gunwale. He was trying to sort out what had happened, dazed because it had happened so quickly. One moment he had been digging on the great mountain of sand, the next he had been gripping that depth charge, the next scrabbling wildly away as the charge hurtled into the depths. He wasn’t bleeding anywhere, but his flesh felt raw and bruised and his head ached fiercely. And then, as he stared at the hulk that had begun its eerie movement with the currents, he realized what he’d been trying to dig out: the uppermost portion of a periscope. He’d been digging above the mass of the submarine; it had been buried beneath the tons of rock and sand, and the explosion had ripped it free.

Moore unfastened his straps and heaved his tank over into the boat’s bottom. Then he painfully pulled himself over, his muscles tight and unyielding, and quickly cranked up the anchor with the hand winch. He laid the anchor in the bow, started up his motor, and swung the skiff around to follow in the thing’s wake.

He drew up alongside it off the starboard beam, keeping well away in case it suddenly turned or heeled over for the bottom. It was riding low, the waves sliding across the bow and crashing with a hollow boom against the conning tower. A mass of black cables and wires, secured to the forward deck, writhed like angry snakes. The paint was almost completely scoured away to reveal the dark, sea-weathered iron, but here and there remained patches of rust-colored primer and even the original dingy gray. Moore could almost have sworn the old relic was operating under its own power, so straight was its direction, but of course the thing was long deserted—there was no noise of racketing diesels, only the relentless pounding of the sea. He turned the tiller a few degrees, moved in for a closer look. From the distance of only a few yards he could see the rivets in the conning-tower plates, and the sight was oddly disturbing. The plates looked like scales on a huge, prehistoric reptile. A cable as thick as Moore’s arm hung down across the tower bulwark, slapping iron. He recalled a picture he’d seen in an encyclopedia as a child: a black-finned monster rearing high above storm-tossed waves to snap its jagged teeth through the neck of a pterodactyl.

He was entranced by the thing, lost in its aura of power and ancient menace. In another few moments he heard the noise of the sea rushing around the Kiss Bottom reefheads; there were figures standing on the fishing wharfs and beach, others watching from the boatyard. The submarine began to turn, almost imperceptibly, for the opening in the reef, drawn by the influx of water there. Moore turned his skiff to avoid scraping across a gnarled, green-slimed bommie, then found himself in the midst of jagged reefheads. Someone shouted something from the fishing wharfs, but Moore couldn’t hear. The hulk looked like it might pass unscathed through the reef into Coquina’s tranquil harbor, but then he heard a loud grinding of iron across coral. Sea foamed at the bow, and the forward deck began to rise. The currents were driving the hulk across the reef; bits of coral shattered and collapsed under the thing’s weight. The submarine shuddered, grinding forward, the bow rising out of the sea like a knife’s black blade. And then, abruptly, the grinding noise stopped. The submarine was wedged on Kiss Bottom, its bow out of the water but its stern deck still awash. Moore could clearly see the closed vents of the two forward torpedo tubes on the starboard side, and a chill touched the flesh at the back of his neck.

There was more shouting from shore, but Moore wasn’t paying attention. Gulls swooped down from the blue; they circled, screaming, above the hulk, then sailed away on their currents of air as if disdaining contact with the thing. Moore drew nearer; the submarine loomed above him, angled crazily, now motionless. As the breeze swept across it he caught the stench of age, of a slow decay; it smelled to him like the carcass of a pilot whale that had beached itself in a directionless search for the sea. Moore’s skiff moved into the submarine’s shadow, and it towered over him. He cut his motor, tied a line onto the collapsed deck railing, and with a smooth, powerful movement, pulled himself up the railing to the submarine’s deck.

Part of the forward deck had caved in; he could see where the deck plankings had given way. There was still a lot of sand left aboard; it slithered with quiet hissing sounds around Moore’s feet and lay in clumps among the twistings of cables. Just forward of the conning tower there was a deck gun, still firm on its mount and apparently in good shape but for the wet sand that dripped from its muzzle. Moore moved toward the bow, walking gingerly on the slippery planking. He reached the deck gun and hung on to it. Forward of the gun was the square outline of a deck hatch which appeared to be secured. Ahead of him the bow’s sharp spear challenged the sky; railings were twisted and broken, iron scarred and gouged. He left the gun and worked his way forward as if climbing a steep hill. When he glanced back he saw the gun’s bore, black and deadly looking.

He had taken only another step when the planking gave way beneath him. As he slid through the hole he reached out, grasping a cable; it held and he pulled himself back up on deck, his heart hammering. Through the splintered opening Moore saw a gleaming, massive metal tube. He knew very little about submarines, but he figured that the tube, protected by the iron and timber of the superstructure, was actually where the guts of the boat lay. The pressure hull, he remembered it was called, was resistant to the great depths at which these boats had moved. Along the iron sides of the superstructure, the shell that protected the intestines, were dozens of ducts that allowed the water to stream in, cushioning the pressure hull. The engines, the control room, the crew’s quarters, all the other compartments and stations necessary to the submarine’s operation were inside that tube. It looked smaller than he would have imagined. How many men would have manned this thing? Twenty-five? Thirty? Fifty? It seemed impossible that they could have found space to move.

Now there was only the noise of the sea swirling across the submerged aft deck, a series of whispers and groans.

A dead relic, Moore thought, staring at the mass of the conning tower. He saw above it the periscope he’d been trying to dig out. There was a second shaft that looked like another periscope, but this was battered and slightly bent to one side. As the sun baked down, the smell of decay rose all around him. When did this thing go down? he wondered, and what boat was it? There were no identifying symbols or numbers; if there had ever been any, the sand had scraped them off. He felt like a fly crawling along the maw of a crocodile that had come up to sun itself on the rocks. Why, he wondered, did he sense something living about this boat now so long dead?

Moore heard the distant pounding of engines. At first the sound chilled him until he looked toward the harbor and saw one of the beat-up old fishing trawlers approaching with men at the gunwales. A cluster of islanders had gathered on the wharfs, and children were running up and down the beach as if at some kind of festive celebration. He waved a hand at the trawler and a man at the bow waved back.

The trawler, its engines rumbling, pulled up alongside; two brawny islanders leaped over onto the submarine’s deck. Lines were thrown and secured; an anchor chain rattled down and a gangplank was tied into place between the trawler and the hulk. Most of the men seemed reluctant to come aboard but one, a broad-shouldered black wearing a dark-blue cotton shirt and khaki trousers, crossed the gangplank and came over to Moore, avoiding the holes that gaped in the planks.

The man was not quite as tall as Moore but stockier, with iron-gray hair and a firm, chiseled face. He looked into the white man’s eyes and then gazed the length of the thing, as if unsure of what he was seeing.

It came up from the Abyss, Moore said, still shaken.

Christ Jesus! The black shook his head, peering down with deep-set, wary eyes through the broken planking at the pressure hull. Tell me what happened.

I was salvaging, looking for stuff off that freighter down there. This was buried beneath a mound of sand and coral; there was an explosion …

An explosion? He looked up, sharply.

An old depth charge. The shock blew it free, and this thing corked for the surface. God only knows how long it’s been under there.

You’re okay?

Moore nodded. Got a hell of a headache and my ears are ringing like Sunday at the Vatican, but mostly the bastard just scared hell out of me.

I’ve told you before about diving in the Abyss, David, said the man in a West Indian accent polished with a British veneer. Steven Kip had been Coquina’s constable of police for some seven years. He stabbed a finger at Moore. I’ve warned you about all that junk lying underwater, all that war crap. It could’ve been your bones at a thousand fathoms. So you found one damned brass compass. So what? Now this! You’re a fool to go diving alone in there!

Moore said nothing, because he knew the constable was right. The currents were dangerous, the risks great for a group of divers and astronomical for one alone. What was it, he thought grimly, not looking at the other man. His death wish? Damn it to hell!

She’s an old one, Kip said quietly, staring at the deck gun. Sand’s kept her as clean as a new tooth. There was a sudden sharp clatter. One of the islanders was pulling at a cable that snaked off into the water at the stern. Hey! Let that be! The islander looked up, dropped the cable, and backed away from it. How deep? Kip asked Moore.

Hundred and fifty. Pretty close to the surface for one of these.

Kip shook his head. Didn’t want to stay down, did it? There’s supposed to be a main hatch up on the tower. Did you check it?

No, Moore said.

Then let’s get at it. Kip turned from him and made his way past two more islanders who had come aboard.

Watch your step, Moore called to his friend. Deck’s weak in places.

They stepped over the tangle of cables, reached a ladder, and climbed up to the tower bridge.

The bridge was ankle-deep in gray sand and seawater, littered with pieces of planking and clumps of coral. Droplets splattered onto them from the periscope shafts above, ricocheting off the iron bulwark. Kip bent down into the water and parted sand with his hands until at last he uncovered the slab of a hatch. Sealed tight, he said, wiping his forehead with a dripping hand. If we want to get in we’ll have to burn through, and I’m not so certain we want to do that.

Why not?

Still anxious to do some salvaging today, are you? Kip fixed him with a cynical stare. You might be doing your salvaging in Heaven if this thing’s carrying live torpedoes. He stood up, looking toward the stern. There should be a crack somewhere in this boat’s guts. Otherwise what was it doing in the Abyss?

It seems to be stable enough now, Moore said. No indication that it’s sinking.

Kip grunted. "I can understand a dead boat going down. I can’t understand a dead one coming back up. This beats all I’ve ever seen. One thing’s for sure, though. Kiss Bottom’s got a hold on it, and the hulk’s not going anywhere soon. He looked closely at Moore as he leaned back against the bulwark and ran a hand over his face. You want to see Dr. Maxwell, David?"

No, I’m okay. I guess I’m still a little shaky. I knew the storm would have uncovered a lot down there, but I never figured on anything like this.

The constable was silent for a moment, gazing along the wide decks. World War II crate, I’d say. No markings. Could be British, American, Italian, German … who knows? They all prowled these waters during the war. Now that it’s up we’re going to have to do something with it. I can’t leave it out here, but for the life of me I’m stumped as to …

There was another sharp noise of something striking iron. Kip peered over the bulwark, expecting to see one of the islanders again trying to gather up that heavy-duty cable.

But the men were all standing together at the bow. They had been talking quietly, and now they stared up at the constable, their faces frozen, their lips drawn into tight lines. The others on the trawler stood where they were, watching and listening.

And all around a deep, hollow booming—something striking iron with a rising, feverish intensity.

One of the islanders cried out in fear; they all backed away from the tower, moving toward the gangplank and the safety of the trawler.

Moore felt a chill streaking up his spine. What the hell …?

Get off it! a bearded man on the trawler called out.

It’s the sea! Kip said loudly, so they could all hear. What’s wrong with you men? The sea’s coming up and banging around underneath the hull, for God’s sake! But now their eyes were wide and terrified; they were chattering among themselves, and even as they did the noise grew louder and sharper, more frenzied, out of pace with the sea’s rhythm.

Then nothing. And the silence was ten times as bad.

It’s about to come apart, Kip said quietly. Let’s get off this thing. He swung himself easily over the bulwark