The Dark and What It Said Page 11

  He returned his attention to the boarding party’s reports. There were fuel-oil estimates, fresh water reserves, provisions, ammunition; there were the general reports about the condition of the ship as found: boiler room safety valve wide open; primer pins pulled from the depth charges on the quarterdeck, an Abandon Ship procedure so they don’t explode as the ship goes under; all life jackets gone; sextant and log book gone; code and recognition signal books gone, probably dumped -- another Abandon Ship procedure. In fact everything pointed to the orderly evacuation of a sinking ship.

  And then Barrinji didn’t sink.

  A few minutes ago some one had noticed that both anchors were missing, and with them fathoms of chain, tons of weight which, Dixson told himself, might partly explain Barrinji’s miraculous survival. But without engine power and a hand on her helm, he knew the little corvette should’ve broached to on the first storm wave and been rolled under. Strange.

  There was a knock on the cabin door.

  “Come,” said Dixson; he was expecting the Engineer with a report on the pumps. No one entered. “Yes, come in.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Damnation!” Dixson stepped to the door and wrenched it open.

  In the lobby outside stood the lanky, thin face man of the photograph. The figure was shrouded in black, a cloak of darkness that made the thin bloodless face seem to glow. The apparition wavered to and fro like so much tossing flotsam. Then it suddenly swelled toward Dixson, bringing with it a cold dampness, until its face pressed close into his.

  “Leave!”

  Dixson stumbled back, hit the chair and fell. He was on his feet again in an instant, but there was nothing now in the doorway. Feeling strange and shaky he peered into the lobby. It was empty.

  He ran-up the companionway to the bridge and looked wildly left and right.

  “Who came through just then?”

  The seaman sweeping up smashed glass fixed the officer with a stare of surprise.

  “Beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Don’t come the innocence with me, Tyler!” Dixson snapped, slightly shrill. “I’ll have you on report!”

  “Sir... no one’s been through that door. Not since yourself, sir, five minutes ago.”

  The Lieutenant glared at him as if daring him to betray the lie. Then he turned and banged shut the door.

  The Captain’s Cabin was still empty when he returned. Nothing waiting, wavering, dark. But the lobby, an enclosed space between cabins, was cold and smelt unnaturally damp.

  ***

  The circling destroyer had given those aboard Barrinji a sense of security, something they needed as the afternoon brought more blue skies and flat seas. The weather had made them nervous, and noticeably the most nervous of all was Lieutenant Dixson who had suddenly developed the habit of glancing over his shoulder at nothing at all.

  Except for some pumping which had had no effect on the ship’s bows-down attitude, work was preceding well. The anchor chain winch had been unbolted and was about to be manhandled over the side. Oxy cutting gear had been ferried over by motorboat and demolition of the smashed four-inch was well advanced. A tarpaulin had been stretched over the punched-in deck.

  “Steam pressure’s building satisfactorily,” said the Engineer above the hiss of the cutting torch. He paused a moment, wiping his hands down his overalls before adding. “Got the dynamo running now; there’s power in the ship.”

  Lieutenant Dixson acknowledged this with a stiff nod. “How’s that bulkhead? Will it take the strain once we get underway?”

  “It should if you don’t take it too quick; four or five knots should be all right. There’s no leaks and the new shoring’s holding up. But there’s something knocking against that bulkhead, just every now and then a series of taps in the flooded compartments.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I wouldn’t like to say.”

  “Neither would I,” Dixson replied, imagining. He glanced behind him. Nothing was there. “Bloody strange this ship, don’t you think? The way she survived that storm with this sort of damage and no crew; the way everything points to the abandonment of a sinking ship, and then the ship doesn’t sink. Bloody strange.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected a ship damaged like this to survive that storm, no.” The Engineer had wondered about that, of course, though right now he was wondering why the First Lieutenant was talking as if accusing the ship of something like deception. “Just lucky, I suppose.”

  “Lucky,” said Dixson to himself. Then, to the Engineer, “As soon as they’re finished with the anchor winch, detail a couple of hands to dump those depth charges. Without their primer pins they’re just so much amatol waiting on the quarterdeck for the first stray bullet. We won’t be lucky forever.”

  At that moment the winch went over the side with a mighty splash and a cheer. The bows came up, though not by much. Half an hour later they came up more in a series of little jerks as the four-inch gun went over in four or five large slag-edged pieces. This also put the rudder and screws deeper into the water, at the same time bringing into view a jagged hole blown out on the port bow. Some oil oozed, some flotsam drifted out. They waited and watched, but nothing more emerged.

  ***

  Only later, when there was steam pressure and the Engineer had intoned the formula, “Ready to proceed, sir,” did anyone notice the ship’s clocks. On the bridge, in the officers’ quarters and Captain’s Cabin, in the engine room, boiler room and wardroom, all these eight day pieces had stopped at precisely six minutes past six, and no amount of winding, tinkering or swearing would make them work.

  ***

  Just on sunset Barrinji turned to the south-east to begin a five knot waddle to Geraldton, a small port on the Western Australia coast and at three hundred miles the closest harbour. Three to four days were estimated for the voyage, weather permitting. And if things got too rough there was always the destroyer’s motorboat slung in Barrinji’s port side davits...

  “Bitch to steer,” said Tyler, struggling with the wheel. The comment was uncalled for, despite its truth, though Lieutenant Dixson said nothing. He stepped out onto the port bridgewing to watch the destroyer, cut black against the afterglow, racing into the west on her search for Barrinji’s crew.

  Night closed in over the little ship as she plodded on with only a brilliance of stars to light her way and magnetic compasses to guide her. The wind keening through the empty window frames sounded sometimes like lost voices and sometimes like a woman’s crying, but hardly ever like the wind. It blew cold against the men at the engine room telegraphs, the quartermaster wrestling the wheel, the young signalman standing at the back of the bridge in the dark.

  Just before the ten o’clock change of watch, Dixson went out again onto the bridgewing where the wind was honest from the sea and sounded that way. The foredeck below looked a large triangle of shadow, flat save for where wind rippled the tarpaulin. All he could see of the bows was that moment of white water as they nudged waves aside. He looked astern, past the single squat funnel, past their motorboat in the davits, past the minesweeping derricks on the quarterdeck to the wake.

  At five knots Barrinji was hardly churning up the water, making the wake hard to see, making it difficult to determine any doglegging. What he could see of it seemed straight enough. Yet the more he looked the more he thought there was something wrong back there, some indefinite shape trailing in the wake…

  “Callaghan!”

  The young signalman came scuttling up out of the dark. “Sir?”

  “Lay aft. See if we’re dragging something astern.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” The youth slid down the ladder to the main deck.

  Dixson ducked back onto the bridge. “What’s the helm feel like, Tyler?”

  “Heavy handling, sir. But that’s nothing unusual.”

  Dixson grunted, stepped to the opposite bridgewing and looked aft. He thought he saw Callaghan at the stern rails, standing beneath the derrick booms
which were crossed over each other like the resting hands of the dead. But it was hard to tell what was what back there among the paravanes, derricks, cables and winches. Besides, it was dark. And was that thing still in the wake? It was hard to tell.

  “Callaghan!”

  No one answered, nothing moved on the quarterdeck. Then he thought he saw a face appear briefly around the funnel. One of those manning the Bofors gun? He wasn’t sure. He wondered about the face, and wondered why he wasn’t certain who it’d been. But who else could it have been? And where the hell was Callaghan?

  “Callaghan!”

  Again nothing happened while he waited half a minute.

  Dixson put his head around the bridge flap. “Stop both -- no, belay that!” He turned again as the bridge ladder rattled. Young Callaghan came up slowly, hesitant, looking confused. It was this about him which made Dixson hold back from upbraiding him, so that instead he asked with a sense of foreboding, “What did you see?”

  Callaghan shuffled his feet and was unable to meet the officer’s eyes as he said, “There’s... there’s nothing back there, sir.”

  ‘Dixson peered aft. The water did appear empty now. Yet he was sure he’d glimpsed something... “All right. Get to the galley and fetch us up some cocoa.”

  Dixson watched Callaghan descend the ladder again, not so sprightly this time. Another long look aft showed nothing. He shrugged and wondered why Callaghan had lied.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes before sunrise Barrinji went to Dawn Action Stations. Her three guns swung through their arcs, waiting. But the sun came up in a clear sky over a smooth sea to show an unbroken horizon.

  The ship’s clocks took no notice of time as watch followed watch throughout the day. It was six minutes past six aboard Barrinji and that was that. A story was getting around that somebody had altered one of the clocks, tired of seeing its hands standing always in the same positions; yet later it was found showing again six past six...

  ***

  Late that afternoon a seaplane droned out of the north on an apparent interception course. Those who had them raised long-barrel binoculars to see the red ball insignia on the wings and fuselage. The plane came on at a steady speed, too high for their guns, closing until even those without binoculars could see the pontoons beneath its wings. A seaplane this far out could only mean a cruiser somewhere close by; 10,000 tons of brutal steel which might come prowling over the horizon at any moment.

  “Stop both!” ordered Dixson.

  The engine room telegraphs rang. Barrinji lost way and stopped, small and quiet, showing no wake now. The plane’s shadow flickered over the ship.

  “He must be blind,” some one whispered on the bridge.

  But the plane droned over them, and five minutes later was a fading speck in the south.

  “I’m taking out a ticket in Tatts when we get back,” said one of the telegraphmen and, on orders from the Lieutenant, pushed his lever forward again to SLOW AHEAD.

  Dixson sat down on the Captain’s stool at the back of the bridge as the wind picked up through the windows. Just lucky, I suppose, he recalled the Engineer’s words of the previous day. A strange sort of luck, he went on thinking, to survive a storm and lose a crew. He couldn’t help but think the word unnatural better described Barrinji’s luck, and wondered what it was exactly he meant by it. Thoughts linked to thoughts, leading his mind unwillingly back to that wavering dark thing in the lobby. Leave. He’d been unable to deny to himself the reality of the figure as he wished he could; while at the same time unable to comprehend that reality. Leave. Why leave? Barrinji had proved a lucky ship so far for himself and his men, if not for her original crew.

  “Lucky,” he said softly.

  .”Beg your pardon, sir?”

  Dixson almost jumped. But it was only Chief Bosun’s Mate Frood – the Buffer – standing beside him in the gathering shadows and doing his job as the officer -- an ad hoc officer -- of this particular watch.

  “Lucky,” repeated Dixson.

  “About the plane, yes, sir.”

  “About everything, Buffer. The plane, the calm seas, lack of enemy attention, the way she survived that storm damaged like she is and with no crew.”

  “Yes, sir. Lucky.”

  The way he said it seemed to add, But not for her crew, and Dixson was about to ask him if he didn’t think it an unnatural sort of luck when he decided not to. It would’ve been an odd question, especially coming from an officer and in front of other ratings. Besides, he wasn’t really sure what it was he was getting at. So he said, “Get the chart and I’ll check our course. Looks like we’re in for another starry night.” With that the subject of luck and lucky ships was closed, and with it any chance of talk straying close to dark things in lobbies.

  ***

  After sunset Lieutenant Dixson took his sextant sightings on the starry sky he’d predicted and found Barrinji’s position. Leaving the Buffer in charge, he retired to the asdic cabinet to sleep the few hours until ten when his watch would begin.

  The asdic cabinet, normally the noisy heart of anti-submarine activity, was a quiet, still cubby hole at the back of the bridge. The asdic set itself sat screwed to the bulkhead, its valve innards shock-smashed to uselessness, its earphones hanging mute upon a hook. The oscillating quartz crystal -- the actual ping machinery -- lay drowned in the flooded forward compartments.

  Dixson sat in the operator’s chair and slept.

  Sometime later he awoke, or half awoke, to the distant voices of a man and a woman; fighting voices, thin telephone voices with no distinct words but full of blame, anger and fear. The woman sounded a hard bitch, iron hard, and the man sounded dangerously close to violence. As Dixson opened his eyes the voices faded away, and in fading sped up like an old gramophone wound too tight too long. To Dixson the silence seemed worse than the voices because it was the silence of a dead ship creeping across the ocean when she should be naturally in her grave three miles down.

  The bizarre fancy collided with his hope that the past few seconds with their inexplicable sounds had been a dream, just a dream. For a moment he thought the ship was dead and at the bottom of the sea, and that this thing carrying him back to safety and land was a ghost, the last mad wish of dead men in two storm-lost boats.

  He banged his feet down on the deck. He was satisfied. Barrinji was no ghost. She was real, iron real, iron hard under his feet. Yet with his acceptance of the reality of the ship came the whispering memory of a darkness-shrouded thing. It was a memory, he knew, that would be with him always, locked away in a brain cell marked Do Not Disturb. It would do the disturbing, slipping out in the quiet moments or in his sleep to push up against his face and whisper Leave. He wished he could leave. He wished he could pull the plug on this ugly little scow and --

  “First Lieutenant, sir. Twenty-two hundred, sir,” said Frood in the cabinet doorway.

  “Very good, Buffer. Thank you.”

  Through the broken windows of the bridge the stars shone bright and sharp. The sea was flat like a table top. No enemy shouldered over the horizon in the night, nor during the next day. As though the war was somebody else’s problem a million miles away, Barrinji steamed along at her five knot waddle, and the fine weather went on and on.

  “What did you really see back there?” Lieutenant Dixson asked young Callaghan in the quiet of the bridgewing.

  The signalman blushed. He was not a liar, not really, and Dixson knew it. “I saw boats,” he answered simply.

  For better or worse, Dixson let it go at that.

  ***

  During the mid-watch of the following day, with the Buffer on the bridge, Dixson climbed down to inspect the bulkhead of the gyro compass room again. The wooden shoring braced and wedged against the buckled plating was still holding and all seams were dry. Nevertheless, the bosun’s store hatch had been secured behind him. The Engineer had told him that the simple sit-down job of listening outside the bosun’s store was unpopular with the men. Dixson didn
’t have to ask why. He knew.

  He knew as he stood in that last dry forward compartment and listened alone to the oddly timed tap-tap inside the flooded spaces. He knew as he returned to the bosun’s store hatch with the rhythm still with him. He knew as he stepped over the coaming and glanced back over his shoulder before slamming the hatch back into place. And in the crow’s nest far above, the look-out rang down to the bridge saying, “Masts dead astern!”

  ***

  The Action Alarm had been ringing several seconds when Dixson hit the upper deck. Men were running, shrugging on life jackets, tying the chin straps of tin hats. The barrel of the Bofors angled upward. The bridgewing machine guns were cocked and readied. Sailors took up sheltered positions with Tommy guns in their sweaty hands.

  Above the ringing of the alarm bell, somebody shouted from the boat deck, “Ship coming up astern, sir!”

  Dixson spared only a quick look behind him, glimpsing the smoke smudge of something far away coming up at a rate of knots. He spun and made for the bridge, thinking how bloody silly they all looked with what was approaching. And how brave.

  As he hit the rungs of the ladder he yelled, “Shut that bloody bell up!” with a nervous vehemence that surprised him. The alarm cut off as the Buffer pushed binoculars into his hands.

  “Looks like a destroyer, sir.”

  Even as he focused, Dixson was weighing up the chances of it being Japanese. Too near the coast, too far south... Seen bows on it was smoke and bow wave and precious little definite inbetween.

  Signalman Callaghan had the only other pair of binoculars on the bridge. He said, reading a stuttering light from the distant vessel, “Message from the Captain, sir: ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! It’s us!”’ He lowered the glasses and with an inexcusable breech of discipline began to laugh aloud.

  ***

  Nothing had been found of Barrinji’s crew or boats after a thirty-six hour search in screeching winds and crazy cross seas. “Damn queer!’ said the Captain when Dixson told him of their continuing miracle of good weather. “We were battling heavy seas all the way back. Only struck calm water again half an hour before we sighted you.”