The Ebb Tide

my mind simply to admit to St. Ives that I’d rather be pursued by axe wielding savages than to drop blind into a pool of quicksand, but I sat there mute, trying to distract myself with the goings-on outside, looking at the grappling hook where it dangled in the grip of one of the craft’s pitiful claws. My mind argued senselessly with itself — whether it would be courageous to admit my cowardice and stay topside, or cowardly to fear admitting it, descend into the murk, and risk going insane. There would be no opening the hatch in these waters, I told myself insidiously. I pictured Bill Kraken, hurriedly sketching his map in the moonlight, corking it up in a bottle, and heaving it end over end toward solid ground, and I very much hoped that there had been something in the bottle to drink before it became a mere glass mailbag.

But of course there wasn’t a moment to lose. Fred looked at a pocket watch, shouted, “Thirty minutes by the clock!” and St. Ives shut us in tight. We were lifted bodily by the crane, Hasbro turning away with one arm on the windlass crank as if letting down an anchor while Fred held the horses steady. The sound of their voices and labor seemed to come from some great distance as we swung out over the pool of quicksand, me gripping the metal edge of the circular bench as if it were the edge of a precipice.

“Surely the tide won’t return in a mere thirty minutes,” I said to St. Ives.

“No, sir,” St. Ives said. “But we must agree upon an absolute limit, you see. In thirty minutes we’ll either have failed or succeeded. If we succeed, they’ll drag the box out bodily with the crane. If we fail, they’ll drag us out.”

“Good,” I said. “Good.” In fact I liked this very much. Thirty minutes, I told myself. Almost no time at all…

The myriad sounds of the living chamber rose around us, and we began to descend, St. Ives sitting there mute, attentive to his business, not a furrow of concern on his brow. I was already in a cold sweat, trying to manage my breathing, sending my mind off to more pleasant, imaginary, places, only to have it return ungratefully an instant later, not taken in by the ruse.

Now there was nothing outside the ports but brown, mealy darkness, the wall of congealed sands illuminated by the interior lamps. Our tanks were full of ballast to hurry our descent, but even so we drifted downward very slowly, the sand shifting around us, gently disturbed by our passing, with suddenly clear windows of trapped water that closed again at once.

“Two fathoms,” St. Ives said. And then after a time, “Three.”

“What lies beneath us?” I asked, suddenly curious. I hadn’t given any thought to our destination.

“Ah!” St. Ives replied, glancing at me. “That’s an excellent question, Jack. What indeed? More of this quicksand, lying on a solid bottom, perhaps, in which case we’ve almost certainly failed unless we land square on the wagon, because our movements through this sand would be both sightless and slow.” He shook his head. “Or it might be that…” He paused now, staring hard through the port, where there had floated into view the face of a wide-eyed sheep, looking in on us with a certain sad curiosity. Most of it was invisible in the heavy sand, and we could make out only its ghostly visage. It appeared to be perfectly preserved in this dense atmosphere, or more likely only recently drowned. We seemed to draw it along downward for a moment, as if it heeded our departure, but then, like an image in a dream, it faded into the silent darkness overhead.

“Six fathoms,” St. Ives said. “I believe we’re descending more rapidly.”

“The water seems to be clearing,” I pointed out hopefully. “Do you see that broken oar?” It floated some distance away, a piece of an oar weighted down by an iron oarlock. At the depth of the sheep just minutes ago it would have been hidden from us. The sand swirled in an upward flowing current now, as if clear water were rising from beneath us. Then abruptly there was a clattering noise, something hitting the underside of our craft, and we emerged into water that was pellucid as a pail full of rain, and a sight that was utterly uncanny.

A small, upright wooden chair that our craft had apparently driven downward, now bumped and floated its way upward past the ports, and I peered out to watch its ascent. The sand layer hung overhead like a layer of thick clouds, and floating beneath it was a scattering of wooden objects, topsy-turvy chairs and tables from someone’s drawing room, lost to the sands and now forever trapped beneath the heavy ceiling.

“We’ve come through the false bottom,” St. Ives said, “at just over ten fathoms.”

“The false bottom of what?” I asked, letting in a whoosh of air in through the pipes.

“The bottom of the Bay, Jacky. Into subterranean water. I’ve long suspected that there was communication between Morecambe Bay and some of the inland lakes — Windermere and Conniston Water, and perhaps north into the great lochs. There! Do you see?”

And indeed I did. An illuminated area of the actual seabed was clearly visible below us now, alive with great, feathered worms reaching out of holes in the sand, and colorful anemones the size of giant dahlias. A pale halibut, large as a barn door, arose from the bottom and winged its way into the darkness as if we had awakened it, and then a school of enormous squid slipped past, watching us with large eyes that reminded me of the face of the suspended sheep.

With a soft bump we settled into the sand, St. Ives attending to his levers, and almost immediately we were off, striding along on our crooked legs. St. Ives was surer of himself now, having honed his skills on the bottom of the Thames. “We’ve got about two hundred feet of line,” he told me, “and so we’re on a short tether. Some day we’ll come back prepared to do a proper investigation…There’s something!”

There was indeed something — what appeared to be a stagecoach of the sort you might have seen on the Great North Road a century past, when coaches were more elegant than they are today. It stood upright on the sands as if it were a museum tableau — a very dusty museum. The wheels were buried to the axles, the exterior covered with undersea growths — barnacles and opalescent incrustations, decorated by Davy Jones. The skeletons of four horses were tethered to it, and there were human skeletons inside, still traveling hopefully. Household objects littered the sea floor: pieces of luggage, crockery jars, broken crates spilling out bric-a-brac, porcelain vases, an iron teapot, a fireplace screen, bottles, a heavy crystal goblet half full of sand. A small bookcase miraculously stood upright, its glass doors unbroken, the books still standing on the shelves, held in place only by the rigid leather covers, the contents no doubt having melted into mere pulp like a lesson in humility. Fishes swam around and between the lumber of objects, enjoying their inheritance.

As the chamber strode shakily through this undersea museum it was easy for me too imagine what had transpired: the passengers, no doubt the Placer family, crossing the sands in order to avoid the extra few hours of travel around the top of the Bay. The weather had been fine, the sands apparently dry and solid. But then suddenly not so solid — the wheels abruptly mired, the horses stumbling forward, sinking to their withers, thrashing to get out, but simply propelling themselves deeper into the mire, the passengers and the driver pitching the cargo overboard — anything to lighten the load, but all efforts utterly useless except to assure the victims that their worldly goods would be waiting for their arrival at the bottom of the sea.

It was St. Ives’s notion that we were within a vast oceanic cave with a perforated roof, if you will, the quicksand pits created by upwelling currents, which accounted for the suspension of the sand particles and for the firm sand flats and cockle beds in the Bay above, which lay on solid tracts of seabed. There was something immense about the darkness that surrounded us, and it seemed quite possible that this hidden, underwater world, an ocean beneath the ocean, might pass well beyond the shoreline of Morecambe Bay.

And then we saw it: Kraken’s wagon, gradually appearing within our halo of light. I had almost forgotten about it, so caught up was I with the strange nature of the dead place where we had found ourselves. The wagon was settled on a solid bit of sea floor, washed by currents. There was no skeleton, thank God, but that meant only that poor Bill’s bones numbered among the billions scattered across the vast cemetery that is the World Ocean. In the bed of the wagon, beneath a shroud of silt, lay the wood and iron strongbox that contained the device, whatever it was — something worth the death and injury it had engendered, I hoped.

St. Ives looked at his chronometer, and then immediately set to work with the levers that manipulated the grappling hook. On either side of the crate there were what appeared to be leather-covered chains that functioned as handles, and I watched as our mechanical arm extended, its claw reaching out with the hook…. Too far away. We crept closer, bumping up against the side of the wagon with a muted thud. Again the arm reached out.

I became aware of something then: a light in the distance, a bright, moving lamp. It looked almost cheerful in all that darkness, like the moon rising on a dark night, and it took my mind a moment to grasp the fact that it oughtn’t to be there.

“The submarine!” I said, for what else could it be? No sooner had I uttered the words, than the craft turned, displaying its row of illuminated ports. I could make out the dark shadow of its finny shape. St. Ives had been correct. We were in a navigable, subterranean sea, apparently open to the pools or rivers we had encountered in