The Lower Deep (39 page)

Together they struggled through into the coral jungle outside. Together, though almost too weak now to continue, they looked up and put forth a final supreme effort, rising almost vertically through lightening shades of water toward a goal that seemed out of reach.

It was not out of reach. Not quite. Cleaving the sea's glittering surface together, they found themselves at last in blessed sunlight, gasping for air.

Not fifty yards away floated the Port Roche army boat, a gray thirty-five-footer. In her bow, searching the sea with binoculars, stood Lieutenant Roger Etienne.

The lieutenant saw them. Shouting to others on board, he pointed. The idling engine came to life and the boat growled forward.

"Only two of you?" Dr. Stephen Spence said as he and the lieutenant helped the swimmers aboard. "There should be five. Where are the others?"

"Not coming," George said.

"Drowned, you mean?"

"It's a long story."

While Etienne's man Dion turned the boat, the lieutenant stepped into the cabin for blankets. George and Dannie covered their nakedness.

"We're not to wait, then?" Steve Spence's face was a kaleidoscope of emotions.

Startled, George snapped out of his euphoria and looked down at the depths from which Dannie and he had just escaped. "God, no! Get out of here, man!"

At the controls Dion heard and increased the boat's speed. The sea was empty, George saw. The sound of airplane engines caused him to glance up into a cloudless blue sky. In the distance a plane was approaching.

Suddenly Lieutenant Etienne cried out in a hoarse voice, "God in heaven! Look!"

He was staring at a spot in the sea only ninety yards off the boat's bow.

The others stared, too. Dannie André stepped closer to George Benson and clung to him. The sea they all stared at was spinning.

The
Ti Maman,
George thought. Oh, my God. This is what happened to the
Ti Maman.

"T
urn her!" Etienne yelled. "Move, Dion!"

Dion came out of his trance. He threw the wheel hard over, and the boat dipped her rail to the water as she came around to avoid the disturbance. But the hole in the sea had widened and deepened with fantastic speed.

All around it the water was affected. The boat was caught in the gliding rotation before she could accelerate enough to pull free.

George Benson gazed at the hole in horror and was reminded of a day he had stood for half an hour at the brink of the American Falls at Niagara, all but mesmerized by the flawless glide of the water as it began its awesome plunge. This had the same hypnotic effect on him. The sides of
the hole were black, shiny, whirling like a huge metal centrifuge. The suction reached far out.

How were they doing this, those creatures in the depths below? What had Mendoza said before Paul Henninger's spear forever silenced him? "Sudden aberrations in the sea are child's play to these people."

Though she shuddered from bow to stern as she struggled to escape, the army boat was trapped now by the suction.

Bracing himself, George wrapped his arms around Dannie André and held her. She sobbed with her face against his chest, refusing to look at the thing. Lieutenant Etienne stumbled to Dion's side and added his strength to the wheel, but with no effect. Steve Spence, wedged in the cabin doorway, looked long and hard at the core of the yawning peril, then moved his lips in a silent prayer.

Trapped. The boat had already circled the glistening throat of the hole and was beginning
her second circuit, still in the churning water on the
perimeter, but caught. Though far out from the central cavity still, she moved closer to it every second. She was an old craft. Her engine groaned and wheezed now in an all-out effort to break the grip of the suction, but could only delay the inevitable.

If the much more modern
Ti Maman
had been swallowed by this monstrous upheaval in the sea, what chance had a creaky old army craft?

Under George Benson's spread feet the deck began to tilt as the boat leaned toward the heart of
the whirlpool. What was down there? George asked himself. A furious horde of the sea creatures racing at incredible speed in a circle, doing to the sea in their immediate vicinity what the blades of a kitchen blender did to liquid in a blender bowl? He could see down into the core of it now, but its inky blackness concealed what it contained. It was shiny and smooth as glass. It whirled so fast it seemed scarcely to revolve at all, like a piece of precision machinery honed to a high polish.

It could suck down a good-sized boat, he was sure. Anything the size of this craft caught in that relentless gyration would without question be drawn down into it and swallowed.

And there was no noise now. At the turbulent outer edge of the aberration the sea had snarled and hissed as it was forced to begin spinning. Here, nothing. The silence was uncanny, though the bore grew larger every moment. It was fifty feet across now. The lip of the funnel at its top was four times that. Just over the edge of the lip and beginning to slide down its spinning slope, the army boat dipped at an ever more perilous cant.

Not fair, George thought with a bitterness he could taste. After all Dannie and he had been through, this wasn't fair. Damn them. Whatever they were, wherever they came from, damn their slimy souls to hell!

He heard something and looked up. The plane he had noticed before was low over the water, only a little distance away now. A quarter mile, maybe. Coming toward them.

Oh, Christ. If only it were a whirlybird, able to hover over them and lower a ladder. If, if, if. But
its pilot must have seen the disturbance, at least, and was coming to investigate. Had seen them, or would in a moment, and would tell what he had seen. That was something. They would not be just another baffling mystery.

Unless, of course, the plane were somehow trapped, too. Many had disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle.

The others aboard the boat watched the oncoming aircraft as George did. Etienne and Dion at the wheel. Steve Spence in the cabin doorway. Even Dannie, in George's embrace, turned her head and looked up.

"Your navy," Etienne said. "Torpedo plane, looks like. Probably from Guantanamo." In the unreal stillness his voice and the whine of the plane's jet engines were abnormally loud. He said something else but the boat's rate of inclination sharpened at that moment and George, losing his footing, went sprawling to the deck, dragging Dannie with him.

From his position on the deck he could still watch the plane as it entered the sky-space above the hole, however. Not fifty feet above that awesome funnel it came boring in. It had a crew of two, George saw, and was a U.S. Navy plane as Etienne had said—but as it suddenly banked, tipping its cockpit, he saw that the pilot wore a shirt of life-jacket orange.

Its course adjusted, the craft flattened out again. And suddenly from its belly something dropped. Something shaped like a barrel and not very large, though it was hard to be sure because the ob
ject turned as it descended and had a surface that flashed in the sunlight, blinding the eye to details.

The men in the plane were good at what they did, though. The object went straight to the mark, losing its forward momentum at precisely the proper moment and dropping squarely into the whirlpool's throat. But even before it disappeared down that glittering bore, the plane was past and
gone.

Still sprawled on the boat's deck, George Benson looked across at Steve Spence and saw the doctor's lips moving. A prayer? Why not? Struggling to his feet, drawing Dannie up with him, George found himself fighting for balance on a slanting deck that became more difficult every second. He was looking straight down into a funnel of inky darkness.

Suddenly the sea coughed.

It was no more than that: a cough at the base of the funnel, a clearing of the whirlpool's throat. A
minor convulsion.

But up from the depths came a shock wave that stopped the whirling and sped to the surface, closing the hole as it came.

There was a terrifying moment when the new turbulence boiling up under the boat stood it on end. A moment when George had to lock an arm around Dannie and cling with his other hand to the boat's rail or both of them would have been flung into a sea gone mad. A moment when Lieutenant Etienne and his man Dion all but tore the wheel from its shaft as they clung to it, and Steve Spence survived the tumult only because he could brace himself in the cabin's narrow doorway.

Then the fury passed and the sea slowly subsided. The hole was gone. The boat, its engine miraculously still chugging, slowly achieved a forward motion.

"Depth charge," Etienne said. "One of those new hellers, most likely. God in heaven, what was down there, Benson? You were there. You must know."

The lieutenant could have answered his own question—in part, at least—had he stepped to the rail at that moment and looked over the side as George and Dannie were already doing and Steve Spence did a few seconds later after striding from the cabin doorway. Only briefly was the solitary thing visible, though, and even then not clearly. Only long enough for it to be identified as something part human, part monster, weirdly green and frightening by human standards. The explosion must have brought it up from the level where Paul Henninger had been fighting off so many of them, and where, when they became aware of the boat above, they must have banded together to suck it down. Slowly the horror sank from sight.

Had the depth charge reached the cave, too? Had all the sea things been destroyed by it? But, of course, the base here off the coast of St. Joseph was but one of several, according to what they had told Mendoza. Even if all here were dead now, there were others in other parts of the planet's oceans to carry on the program, no?

They would be heard from again, George thought. Even in this part of the Atlantic they would probably establish another base, all the more eager for a human inclusion now that they
knew humans, even very ordinary humans, were so resourceful.

Time would tell.

George Benson caught hold of the woman beside him and said to her very quietly, "Come, Dannie." He led her over to where Dr. Steve Spence now stood at the stern of the boat, gazing without expression at a placid sea. And as the boat turned toward Dame Marie, he touched Steve's arm.

Steve came to with a start.
"Yes?"

"We want to tell you what your Paul Henninger did for us down there," George said. "For all of us, I mean—not just for Dannie and me. He was a very brave man, Doctor."

T
o the lovely young woman lying beside him on the bed in her room, Dr. Stephen Spence spoke very gently, yet with a distinct note of apprehension in his voice.

"It's time, you know, darling. No more excuses. All the other problems are behind us."

Moving in his embrace just enough to brush her lips against his, Nadine Palmer murmured, "Time for what, Steve?"

"For you to come clean with me. Tell me what happened during those five days when I was absent from this world."

"Are you sure you want to know, Steve?" She was not joking, not even smiling.

"I'm sure, no matter what the cost. I can't go on like this."

"We can't just forget it?" she begged.

"No," he said firmly, "we can't just forget it. Damn it, woman, you and I were in love with each other. We had something very special going—a lasting thing, the real thing. Then I went to that blasted voodoo service and left when I was told not to, and five days of my life just disappeared."

"Yes,"
Nadine whispered. "Five days."

"I want to know what happened. What I did that turned you against me. You and Tom Driscoll took care of me and brought me out of it, but by then you were a different woman and I'd lost you. Do you realize you wouldn't even open your door to let me say good-bye when I left for the States?"

He had to wait a moment before Nadine moved again. This time she slid out of his embrace and lifted herself up on one elbow to peer at his face. "All right, Steve. But first tell me something. Who is Gèdé Cinq Jours?"

"What?"

"Who is Gèdé Cinq Jours? I know there are many
Gèdé loa
in voodoo, and as a group they're involved with death, but which one is called Cinq Jours?"

Recalling his talk with Ti-Jean Lazaire, and what had happened outside the door of Tom Driscoll's room later, Steve frowned at her in silence for a few seconds. Then he said slowly, "You're leaving something out, Nadine. There's one more word to that
Gèdé's
name.
Malheur.
It's Gèdé Cinq Jours Malheur
—Gèdé
of the Five Days of Misfortune."