“I’m going to open the hatch,” I said. “Can you pop out and release the stop on the windlass line so that the chamber might float?”
“Done,” Finn said, laying the device on the seat. I threw the hatch open and in a trice he was out and had released the line. I was surprised by the sudden plummet of the craft — a plummet of perhaps six inches — onto the surface of the pool. Finn clambered back into the chamber and shut the door behind him, picking up the device and holding it again, as if he meant to keep it safe. I immediately doubted myself, full of the unsettling notion that we were sinking deeper into the ooze now, that the broad expanse of the wagon had in fact been our temporary security.
On shore, the tall man gave us a discerning look, but again seemed to find our activities irrelevant, as perhaps they were. They had their own line run out and around the trunk of the tree now, and Spanker, who had the build of a Navy topman, was quickly aloft. Within moments he dropped heavily to the deck, ignoring us utterly until he had secured the line to the base of the crane mast. Then he pitched the grappling hook shoreward, and the tall man gave it a turn about the tree, and Spanker moved across to the windlass, where he took the slack out of the rope. He made an effort to turn it farther, to winch the wagon up out of the quicksand, but to little avail. They had a double line on it now, though. No doubt to their mind, the chamber was safe enough. Spanker stepped across the deck toward us. He bent down and made a series of loathsome faces before silently acting out the antics of a man in the throes of suffocation, after which he shook his head sadly, winked at us, and disappeared back up into the tree.
“We’re in the hopper,” Finn said, “and no doubt about it. But my money’s on the Professor and old Mr. Merton. They’ll be along directly.”
“Surely they will,” I said.
“Look at this, sir.” Finn said, nodding at the device now. The crystal had a more pronounced glow, from deep within, and it was blood-warm to the touch. “I believe it’s woke up,” Finn said. “What does it do, do you suppose?”
The term
“Cattle, is it?” He gave me a skeptical look.
There was a decisive sucking noise now, directly below us, and the chamber shuddered and shifted. We held very still. I was certain now that releasing the line had murdered us, that we were sinking, and that someone — Frosticos or St. Ives — would fish the chamber out of the quicksand with two corpses inside.
But we didn’t sink. We shifted and shuddered and sat still again. Then we shuddered, as if the wind were blowing, and kept on shuddering. The two on shore were eating a jolly breakfast now, with a pot of tea and two cups — all very elegant, and meant, no doubt, simply to torment us. Spanker held up a great chunk of bread and jam, raised it in a greedy salute, and devoured it. But the tall one noticed the antics of the chamber, and he set down his teacup and gave us a hard look, as if we were up to something.
And apparently we were, quite literally, for instead of sinking, we seemed to be rising. “We’re off,” Finn said, matter-of-factly. “It’s the device, sure as you’re born. Same as one of those hot air balloons, maybe.”
That made no sense at all to me. How could it be
“He’s off his chump,” Finn said. “Why did he go for the rope when there’s a winch in easy reach?”
“He doesn’t have much of a chump to start with,” I said.
The craft swung and shook as Spanker struggled futilely to accomplish what gravity had failed to accomplish. And then, perhaps realizing that he was dangerously high above the deck of the wagon and that we were drifting to leeward despite the sea anchor, he let go, heaving himself toward the deck of the wagon below, the chamber canting sideways with the force of it. We looked down in time to see him turn in the air, head downward and still a couple of narrow feet from the wagon when he smashed head-foremost into the quicksand with enough force to bury him waist deep, one arm trapped by his side and his legs waving, as in that painting of the fall of Icarus. His free arm and legs worked furiously, driving him downward. The tall man tore at the knotted rope (which, fittingly, Spanker had himself knotted) but he was taking far too long about it. The wind drifted us north, so that we got a better view of the scene below, and what we saw was the tall man pointlessly casting the rope at his erstwhile companion’s ankles in the moment that he slipped beneath the sands and disappeared.
It was in fact a ghastly sight, despite Spanker’s criminal tendencies, and the odd notion came into my mind that I wished I hadn’t known the man’s name. Perhaps it’s not odd. I tried to think of something sufficiently philosophical to say to Finn, but the boy was already nodding his head in contemplation. “In Duffy’s Circus,” he told me, “old Samson the elephant sat down on his trainer, something like a tea cosy over the teapot, if you see what I mean. He was a terrible man named Walsh, and his head went straight up the hiatus. The doctor told us that Samson smothercated him dead.”
I wondered in that moment, from my elevated per-spective, how I had ever come to doubt the boy. My doubts had all been speculative. His actions had clearly professed his innocence and loyalty. A high regard for one’s powers of logic, I told myself, can smothercate a man.
“Take a look down the way, sir,” Finn said now, pointing out toward the Bay.
I took a look. It was St. Ives and Fred Merton, perhaps a quarter mile down toward Grange-over-Sands, coming along the trail by the shore. Merton carried a rifle. They had seen us right enough, floating there high above the treetops, and they stood for a moment marveling at the sight. As for us, we could see far out into the broad Atlantic, the dark line westward being the shore of Ireland, I believe, and the Isle of Man sitting in the sea in between. I opened the hatch, leaning out into the giddy breeze, and pointed downward, toward where the tall man stood at the edge of the pool in dazed contemplation. He apparently saw the signal himself, deduced that reinforcements had arrived, and set out at a dead run toward his camp, carrying his rifle.
St. Ives and Merton were wary, of course, and came along much more slowly. By the time they reached the camp our assailant had fled in his shay, leaving his accoutrements behind. From our height we could see him scouring along the road in the distance, but there was nothing at all to do about it, which was a dirty shame. Hasbro had been shot twice in the space of a few days by the same man, a man who had no motive aside from mere sport, which says something about human degradation that I’d rather not soil these pages speculating upon. Justice, I’m afraid, sometimes is not met out on Earth, or at least not that we know of. But then I’m reminded of Spanker, burrowing his way to Hell, and I find that there’s little satisfaction in that sort of justice anyway.
We descended from our height after a good deal of shouted communication with St. Ives. The device — an anti-gravity mechanism that reacted quite simply to heat — bodily heat and radiant sunlight in our case — gradually lost its powers when Finn was induced simply to set it down onto the deck of the chamber. Later St. Ives speculated that the naturally high degree of heat in the manure heap on Parson Grimstead’s property had been sufficient to elevate the immediately surrounding cattle. Our descent was every bit as graceful as our ascent, although far more disappointing, for I rather enjoyed the view.
As for Dr. Frosticos, he and his submarine didn’t reappear, and so we had no choice but to keep his diving chamber until he called for it. We took a certain joy in the fact that he had failed in all his endeavors, and that in his last, mad rush in the submarine he had passed out of our lives again, at least for a time.
Uncle Wiggily, an Afterword to “The Ebb Tide”
Uncle Wiggily, By James P. Blaylock
As some few of my readers know (perhaps very few) the first of my stories involving Professor Langdon St.
