Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (17 page)

Now regarding those star-shaped stones, something more: I wasn’t the only one to escape with my life the night Sea-Maid went down. No, that’s not strictly true, I was the only one to live through that night -but there was a certain member of the team who saw what was coming and got out before it happened. And it was because of the star-thing that he went!

Joe Borszowski was the man - superstitious as hell, panicky, spooked at the sight of a mist on the sea - and when he saw the star-thing … !

It happened like this:

We’d drilled a difficult bore through some very hard stuff when, as I’ve said, a core-sample produced the first of those stars. Now, Chalky had reckoned the one he sent me to be a fossilized starfish of sorts, from a time when the North-Sea used to be warm; a very ancient thing. And I must admit that with its five-pointed shape, and being the size of a small starfish, I believed him to be correct. Anyway, when I showed this second star to old Borszowski he nearly went crackers! He swore we were in for trouble, demanded we all stop drilling right away and head for land, insisted that our location was

‘accursed’, and generally carried on like a mad thing without explaining why.

Well, I couldn’t just leave it at that; if one of the lads was around the twist, you know (meaning Borszowski), he could well affect the whole operation, jeopardize the whole thing; especially if his madness took him at an important time. My immediate reaction was to want him off the rig, but the radio had been giving us a bit of bother so that I couldn’t call in Wes Atlee, the chopper pilot. Yes, I’d seriously thought of having the Pole lifted off by chopper. The gangs can be damned superstitious, as you well know, and I didn’t want Joe infecting the other lads with his wild fancies. As it turned out, that sort of action wasn’t necessary, for in no time at all old Borszowski was around apologizing for his outburst and trying to show how sorry he was about all the fuss he’d made. Something told me, though, that he’d been quite serious about his fears - whatever they were.

And so, to put the Pole’s mind at rest (if I possibly could), I decided to have the rig’s geologist, Carson, take the star to bits, have a closer look at it, and then let me know what the thing actually was. Of course, he’d tell me it was simply a fossilized starfish; I’d report the fact to Borszowski; things would be back to normal. So naturally, when Carson told me that it wasn’t a fossil, that he didn’t know exactly what it was - well, I kept that bit of information to myself and told Carson to do the same. I was sure that whatever the trouble was with Borszowski, well, it wouldn’t be helped any by telling him that the star-thing was not a perfectly ordinary, completely explicable object.

The drilling brought up two or three more of the stars down to about a thousand feet, but nothing after that, so for a period I forgot all about them. As it happened, I should have listened a bit more willingly to the Pole

- and I would have, too, if I’d followed my intuition.

You see, I’ve got to admit that I’d been spooky myself right from the start.

The mists were too heavy, the sea too quiet… things were altogether too queer all the way down the line. Of course, I didn’t experience any of the troubles the divers or geologists had known - I didn’t join the rig until she was in position, ready to chew - but I was

certainly in on it from then on. It had really started with the sea-phones, even before the advent of the stars.

Now, you know I’m not knocking your phones, Johnny; they’ve been a damn good thing ever since Seagasso developed them, giving readings right down to the inch, almost, so’s we could tell just exactly when the drill was going through into gas or oil. And they didn’t let us down this time, either … we simply failed to recognize or heed their warnings, that’s all.

In fact, there were lots of warnings, but, as I’ve said, it started with the sea-phones. We’d put a phone down inside each leg of the rig, right on to the seabed where they sat ‘listening’ to the drill as it cut its way through the rocks, picking up the echoes as the steel worked its way down and the sounds of the cutting rebounded from the strata below. And, of course, everything they ‘heard’ was duplicated electronically and fed out to us through our computer. Which was why we believed initially that either the computer was on the blink or one of the phones was shaky. You see, even when we weren’t drilling - when we were changing bits or lining the hole - we were still getting readings from the computer!

Oh, the trouble was there all right, whatever it was, but it was showing up so regularly that we were fooled into believing the fault to be mechanical. On the seismograph, it showed as a regular blip in an otherwise perfectly normal line; a blip that came up bang on time once every five seconds or so - blip .

. . blip … blip - very odd! But, seeing that in every other respect the information coming out of the computer was spot on, no one worried overmuch about this inexplicable deviation. The blips were there right to the end, and it was only then that I found a reason for them, but in between there came other difficulties - not the least of them being the trouble with the fish.

Now, if that sounds a bit funny, well, it was a funny business. The lads had rigged up a small platform, slung twenty feet or so below the main platform and about the same height above the water, and in their off-duty hours when they weren’t resting or knocking back a pint in the mess, you could usually see one or two of them down there fishing.

First time we found anything odd in the habits of the fish around the rig was one morning when Nick Adams hooked a beauty. All of three feet long, the fish was, wriggling and yellow in the cold November sunlight. Nick just about had the fish docked when the hook came out of its mouth so that it fell back among some support-girders down near where leg number four was being washed by a slight swell. It just lay there, flopping about a bit, in the girders. Nick scrambled down after it with a rope around his waist while his brother Dave hung on to the other end. And what do you think? When he got down to it, damned if the fish didn’t go for him! It actually made to bite him, flopping after him on the girders, and snapping its jaws until he had to yell for Dave to haul

him up.

Later he told us about it; how the damned thing hadn’t even tried to get back into the sea, seeming more interested in setting its teeth in him than preserving its own life! Now, you’d expect that sort of reaction from a great eel, Johnny, wouldn’t you? But hardly from a cod - not from a North-Sea cod!

From then on, Spellman, the diver, couldn’t go down-not wouldn’t, mind you, couldn’t - the fish simply wouldn’t let him. They’d chew on his suit, his air-hose … he got to be so frightened of them that he became quite useless to us. I can’t see as I blame him, though, especially when I think of what later happened to Robertson.

But of course, before Robertson’s accident, there was that further trouble with Borszowski. It was in the sixth week, when we were expecting to break through at any time, that Joe failed to come back off shore leave. Instead, he sent me a long, rambling explanatory letter; and to be truthful, when first I read it, I figured we were better off without him. The man had quite obviously been cracking up for a long time. He went on about monsters, sleeping in great caverns underground and especially under the seas, waiting for a chance to take over the surface world. He said that those star-shaped stones were seals to keep these monster beings (‘gods’, he called them) imprisoned; that the gods could control the weather to a degree; that they were capable of influencing the actions of lesser creatures - such as fish, or, occasionally, men - and that he believed one of them must be lying there, locked in the ground beneath the sea, pretty close to where we were drilling. He was frightened we were going to set it loose! The only thing that had stopped him from pressing the matter earlier was that then, as now, he’d believed we’d all think he was mad! Finally, though, he’d had to ‘warn’ me, knowing that if anything did happen, he’d never forgive himself if he hadn’t at least tried.

Well, like I say, Borszowski’s letter was rambling and disjointed - and yet, despite my first conclusion, the Pole had written the thing in a rather convincing manner. Hardly what you’d expect from a real madman. He quoted references from the Bible, particularly Exodus 20:4, and again and again emphasized his belief that the star-shaped things were nothing more or less than prehistoric pentacles laid down by some great race of alien sorcerers many millions of years ago. He reminded me of the heavy, unusual mists we’d had and of the queer way the cod had gone for Nick Adams. He even brought up again the question of the shaky sea-phones and computer; making, in toto, an altogether disturbing assessment of Sea-Maid’s late history as applicable to his own odd

fancies.

In fact, I became so disturbed by that letter that I was still thinking about it later that evening, and about the man himself, the superstitious Pole.

I did a little checking on Joe’s background, discovering that he’d travelled far in his early days to become something of a scholar in obscure mythological matters. Also, it had been noticed on occasion - whenever the mists were heavier than usual, particularly since the appearance of the first star-stone

- that he crossed himself with a strange sign over his breast. A number of the lads had seen him do it. They all told the same tale about that sign; that it was pointed, one point straight up, two more down and wide, two still lower but closer together. Yes, the Pole’s sign was a five-pointed star! And again I read his

letter.

By then we’d shut down for the day and I was out on the main platform having a quiet pipeful - I can concentrate, you know, with a bit of ‘baccy. Dusk was only a few minutes away when the … accident… happened.

Robertson, the steel-rigger, was up aloft tightening a few loose bolts halfway up the rig. Don’t ask me where the mist came from, I don’t know, but suddenly it was there. It swam up from the sea, a thick grey blanket that cut visibility down to no more than a few feet. I’d just shouted up to Robertson, telling him that he’d better pack it in for the night, when I heard his yell and saw his lantern (he must have lit it as soon as the mist rolled in) come blazing down out of the greyness. The lantern disappeared through an open hatch, and a second later Robertson followed it. He went straight through the hatchway, missing the sides by inches, and then there came the splashes as first the lantern, then the man hit the sea. In two shakes of a dog’s tail Robertson was splashing about down there in the mist and yelling fit to ruin his lungs, proving to me and the others who’d rushed out from the mess at my call that his fall had done him little harm. We lowered a raft immediately, getting two of the men down to the water in less than two minutes, and no one gave it a second thought that Robertson wouldn’t be picked up. He was, after all, an excellent swimmer. In fact, the lads on the raft thought the whole episode was a big laugh … that is until Robertson started to scream!

I mean, there are screams and there are screams, Johnny! Robertson wasn’t drowning - he wasn’t making noises like a drowning man!

He wasn’t picked up, either. No less quickly than it had settled, the mist lifted, so that by the time the raft touched water visibility was normal for a November evening … but there was no sign of the steel-rigger. There was something, though, something we’d all forgotten - for the whole surface of the sea was silver with fish!

Fish! Big and little, almost every indigenous species you could imagine. The way they were acting, apparently trying to throw themselves aboard the raft, I had the lads haul themselves back up to the platform as soon as it became evident that Robertson was gone for good. Johnny - I swear I’ll never eat fish again.

That night I didn’t sleep very well at all. Now, you know I’m not being callous. I mean, aboard an oceangoing rig after a hard day’s work, no matter what has happened during the day, a man usually manages to sleep. Yet that night I just couldn’t drop off. I kept going over in my mind all the …

well, the things - the odd occurrences, the trouble with the instruments and the fish, Borszowski’s letter again, and finally, of course, the awful way we lost Robertson - until I thought my head must burst with the burden of wild notions and imaginings going round and round inside it.

Next afternoon the chopper came in again (with Wes Atlee complaining about having had to make two runs in two days) and delivered all the booze and goodies for the party the next day. As you know, we always have a blast aboard when we strike it rich - and this time the geological samples had more or less assured us of a good one. We’d been out of beer a few days by that time - poor weather had stopped Wes from bringing in anything but mail -and so I was running pretty high and dry. Now you know me, Johnny. I got in the back of the mess with all that booze and cracked a few bottles. I could see the gear turning from the window, and, over the edge of the platform, the sea all grey and eerie-looking, and somehow the idea of getting a load of booze inside me seemed a damn good one.

I’d been in there topping-up for over half an hour when Jeffries, my 2IC, got through to me on the telephone. He was in the instrument cabin and said he reckoned the drill would go through to ‘muck’ within a few more minutes. He sounded worried, though, sort of shaky, and when I asked him why this was, he didn’t rightly seem able to answer - mumbled something about the instruments mapping those strange blips again, regular as ever but somehow stronger …

closer.

About that time I first noticed the mist swirling up from the sea, a real pea-souper, billowing in to smother the rig and turn the men on the platform to grey ghosts. It muffled the sound of the gear, too, altering the metallic clank and rattle of pulleys and chains to distant, dull noises such as I might have expected to hear from the rig if I’d been in a suit deep down under the sea. It was warm enough in the back room of the mess there, yet unaccountably I found myself shivering as I looked out over the rig and listened to the ghost sounds of machinery and men.