Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef - By Charles Williams Page 0,1
came about, they had acknowledged there was something ominous about it. Backing down fast on the engines to remain there and hold her captive, they had put over the work boat to investigate. There was no need to launch a lifeboat. It had been flat calm for days, and the slight breeze which had sprung up in the afternoon was scarcely enough to ripple the gently heaving pastures of the Gulf.
Freya, of San Juan, P.R., it said under her stern, and the master of the tanker studied her curiously while he waited for the mate to come back to the bridge. She was a long way from home. He wondered what she was doing this far to the westward, in the Gulf of Mexico, and why a small boat from Spanish Puerto Rico should have been named after a Norse goddess.
The mate came up on the bridge carrying the big ledger and the satchel. “Sick?” the captain asked. “Or dead?”
“Gone,” the mate said, with the air of a man who has been talking to ghosts without believing in them. “Just gone. Like that. Remember the Celeste?
“Two of ‘em, as near as I can figure it,” he went on, sketching it tersely. “A man and a woman. One or both of ‘em was there not over an hour ago.”
“Well, as soon as you get that line on her we’d better go back and see,” the captain said. “Anything in the log?”
“Gibberish,” the older man replied. He passed over the book, and then the satchel. “Take a gander in that, Cap. Whatever was botherin’ ‘em, it wasn’t financial trouble.”
The captain pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he opened the bag to stare briefly and incredulously at the bundles of currency. He looked outward at the Freya, where the men were making the towline fast, and frowned thoughtfully. Then he opened the big journal at the page the mate indicated and read the last entry.
He frowned again.
The rapture . . . the rapture.
Something nudged gently at his mind. He groped for it, and found it. He was a studious and reflective seafaring man who had read Conrad, and the thing which had struck him was the odd, reverse-English similarity to Kurtz’s agonized death cry in The Heart of Darkness. “The horror. The horror.”
Flipping back, he hurriedly read the last five or six pages of the handwritten journal. Then he closed it gently and walked to the wing of the bridge to stand looking down.
“When you get your men aboard,” he said slowly, “you can resume your course, Mr. Davidson.”
“We’re not going back?” the mate asked incredulously.
The captain shook his head. “There’s nothing to go back for.”
“But, Cap—That coffee was still warm. And she couldn’t have been logging over two knots. We might find ‘em.”
“No.” The captain gazed back over the flat surface of the sea that was red now in the afterglow. “No. You’d find nothing. Nothing at all.”
But in the end, of course, they did go back, with a lookout on the foremast with the big Navy glasses. They served the sea, and the sea demanded it. And they found nothing but the empty and darkening prairies of the Gulf.
When there was no longer any light at all and they had given up and resumed their course, the captain counted the money in the presence of two of the ship’s officers and locked it in the safe. It came to eighty-three thousand dollars. Then he sat down alone in his office and opened the journal again.
He pulled the long strand of ash-blond hair through his fingers and held it up to the light. Freya, he thought musingly; Freya, the Viking goddess of love. He wished now he had boarded the sloop himself. The mate was a superb sailor, and intelligent, with a sharp eye for detail and clues in a thing like this, but he wasn’t a particularly sensitive man.
Maybe he could have felt it if he had stood there in the cabin where it had been. The span of time it took a pot of coffee to cool was not a very long one, and whatever was there must have been powerful, and magnificent, and perhaps even terrifying. Emotion was intangible, of course, and should leave no traces after the people who had felt it were gone, but—who knew? Perhaps even now, eddying in lifeless air in the corners of that deserted cabin—
He opened the journal at the first page and began to read.