Echoes of the Fourth Magic tcoya-1 Read online

  “So we’ve solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle,” Corbin said grimly. “Or at least we know where everything went.”

  “Not to see the surface again,” Billy found himself saying. He fell silent and slumped back.

  Mitchell slammed his hands down on the edge of the table and leaped up from his chair, leaning ominously over them to give them a closer look at his scowl. “You keep your minds on your work! Got it?” He turned impatiently on Reinheiser. “Are you ready to talk yet? You’ve got something clicking around that brain of yours.”

  Martin Reinheiser stared intently at the men around the table, trying to determine the best way to present his theories. He fixed his gaze on Doc Brady.

  “First of all, let me assure you that conditions here are normal and within the framework of our laws and calculations. There are no preservatives in the water, no special oxygen or chemical balance to keep a cadaver fresh, and my own examination of a water sample shows it teeming with the expected bacteria.” Brady shook his head insistently and Reinheiser held up his hand to block any interruptions. “I understand your doubts, Doctor, but there is another explanation. I believe the key to this riddle lies not in abnormal physiological conditions, but in the fourth dimension, time.”

  “Are you saying that we were thrown back in time?” Doc Brady demanded, his tone echoed perfectly in the incredulous stares that fell over Reinheiser from every direction.

  Idiots, Reinheiser thought. I knew that this was beyond them. “No,” he calmly countered, though his shrill voice took on a knifelike edge. “Not pushed back, but pushed into a different frame of reference.”

  They didn’t seem to understand.

  “Our concepts view time as relative,” he explained. “An hour to a man on a rocket approaching the speed of light would be days, weeks, even years to a man on Earth.”

  “I haven’t been on any rockets lately,” remarked an obviously doubting Mitchell.

  “Yet this illustrates what I believe has happened to us,” Reinheiser went on. “We have been pushed into a time frame where one hundred fifty years of our history has been condensed into twelve to fifteen hours, judging from the doctor’s report on the cadaver taken from the Bella.”

  “I said that the body was in the water for about twenty-four hours,” Doc Brady corrected.

  “Yes, Doctor, but we were in this frame for approximately ten hours before the body was recovered.”

  “Wait a minute,” Del demanded, looking hard at the physicist. “If what you’re saying is true, and we’ve been down here about fifteen hours, then…”

  “Then one hundred and fifty years have passed on the surface,” Reinheiser finished. “And everyone we ever knew is dead and buried.”

  With the unreality of everything that had already happened to them, they found it hard to summarily dismiss Reinheiser’s conclusions. Shaking their heads and muttering denials, they looked around at each other, searching for confirmations to the absurdity of the explanation. This angered Reinheiser even more, not because they didn’t believe him-he hadn’t expected them to-but because of their outright trepidation, even horror, at his suggestion. Could they be so inane as to disregard the incredible implications?

  “Think of it, gentlemen!” the physicist exclaimed. “A new world awaits us. Think of the advancements in science! In medicine, Doctor!” He was almost pleading with them, holding out hope that they weren’t as small-minded as they appeared.

  “Bullshit!” Mitchell blurted. He towered over the seated physicist, not even trying to conceal his disappointment. “Is this the best you’ve got for me?”

  “I assure you, I intend to prove my theory,” Reinheiser replied, knowing full well what Mitchell needed from him.

  “And how can you do that while we’re still down here?”

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” Del answered. Startled, both Reinheiser and Mitchell looked over at him. “Tomorrow morning we send out divers to recover two bodies, one from our ship and another one from the Bella. If the theory is right, Doc’s autopsy should show our crewman to have been dead in the water for about thirty-four hours and the body from the Bella for forty-six to forty-nine hours.”

  Reinheiser’s surprised look turned icy. He was amazed at Del’s show of reasoning, but mostly he was angry, preferring to explain his own theories without any help from a layman. “Precisely,” he snarled at Del, narrow-eyed.

  “Whether or not my theory is correct, I believe that we can escape from here,” the physicist went on. “If we can patch the holes and get the sub up, magnetic influences should force us to the funnel. A storm might push us out, just as one pushed us in.”

  “It won’t work,” Thompson said, immediately stifling the hopeful looks of the others. “No way can I make the patches strong enough to handle the kind of pressure that’s on the other side of that hole.”

  “Our hull couldn’t sustain that kind of pressure if it were intact,” Reinheiser retorted. “The hydraulic system was destroyed.”

  “Then how?” Corbin asked.

  “I’m gambling that we won’t have to worry about the pressure.”

  Mitchell huffed sarcastically, the tone itself refuting Reinheiser’s assertions.

  “Look around you!” Reinheiser fumed, fed up with being ridiculed by his inferiors. “Do I have to spell it out to the letter? Why wasn’t the hull of the Wasp crushed under the pressure of twenty-seven thousand feet of water? That corpse still had its top hat and cane!” His voice mellowed as he perceived that the puzzled expressions of the others no longer held any hint of protest, only intrigue. “The only possible explanation is that the electromagnetic storms which brought these ships and planes here, somehow shielded them from the ocean pressure.”

  “But we didn’t have anything protecting us when we went through,” Del pointed out.

  “We didn’t get caught in the storm,” Reinheiser explained. “We got hit by the storm, outside its bubble, merely in the way of devastation’s chosen path.”

  The men looked around to each other with hopeful shrugs. Perhaps they didn’t believe Reinheiser on a rational level, but they had a desperate need for some sliver of hope.

  “But we don’t have the supplies to just float around and wait for a storm,” Del said. His voice wasn’t hostile; he was asking, not arguing.

  “We shan’t wait long,” Reinheiser replied. “That portal is the barrier between two very different magnetic fields. The interaction of those fields constantly produces violent electrical storms.”

  “But how often?” Mitchell argued, disgruntled at the second apparent flaw in Reinheiser’s plans. “Every couple of months? Or years apart? We don’t have that much time.”

  “Again you are looking at things from the wrong point of view, Captain,” the physicist said with a superior smile, truly enjoying having an answer for every doubt. “The storms occur every few weeks or so on the other side of the barrier, the other frame of reference. Down here that translates to hours or even minutes.”

  The physicist looked around at the others, noting the slight, hesitant glimmer of hope on their faces. Give them what they need to hear, he reminded himself, and he looked straight into each set of pleading eyes.

  “We can escape.”

  Chapter 4

  Eulogy

  WONDERMENT OVERWHELMED HIM. Every escapist instinct within Del told him to swim away from the Unicorn and lose himself in history. He had thrust himself into the heart of an untainted legacy. So much more than a museum, this place held unfabricated, unbiased testimony to the world’s past in ways and with a purity that books, models, even exacting restorations could not begin to approach. He could spend a lifetime swimming among these snapshots of different times; he thought of the many history classes he’d taken in college, of the dry lectures, or even the good ones from the rare, animated professor with a passion for the subject. Yet even those superb teachers and their impassioned recounting could not begin to approach the sense of marvelous reality that Del
felt out here. He wanted to stay and to swim and to learn.

  His first order of business was a bit more grim, though. He had to remove the bodies of his dead shipmates who’d been drowned in the sub and select one for Brady’s test of Reinheiser’s time theory. He moved to the jagged tear in the Unicorn’s hull and peeked inside.

  The destruction was total. Splintered bunks, shredded blankets, and blasted footlockers floated about and lay jumbled in uneven heaps.

  And scattered all about the mounds, meshed in like just so much more debris, were Del’s shipmates.

  Del set a determined visage and squeezed in through the hole. Working methodically and with as much detachment as he could muster, he brought each man out and released him to his watery grave, saving the last body for the experiment, bringing it back to the air lock, where those inside the sub could retrieve it.

  Del’s second mission was to retrieve a body from the Bella. This task both scared and intrigued him, his imagination running wild in this eerie scene, already launching several promising plots for horror movies. But at the same time, Del could not repress his curiosity about the wonders around him.

  When he first went aboard the Bella, he moved gingerly, like an archaeologist brushing sand away from an ancient relic or an historian leafing through a delicate medieval manuscript. Before long, though, he realized that this ship was not in any way fragile with age. Her flooring remained unwarped and her masts stood straight and firm. Del was convinced that if she were raised and her hull patched, the Bella could sail proudly once again.

  He moved without hesitation to the door leading belowdecks and found a suitable cadaver for Brady as soon as he opened it. But that would have to wait, for he pushed his way past the corpse, determined to get a closer look at whatever relics lay below.

  It exceeded anything his imagination could have hoped for. Everything that wasn’t bolted down had been jumbled and battered, but that included just a small fraction of the room’s contents. How well the people of this age had prepared to handle the tossing of heavy seas! Del had always known that danger was a very real fact of a nineteenth-century sailor’s existence, but had never fully appreciated just how powerful an influence the unpredictable savagery was for the Bella’s gallant crew, and for all the sailors who had braved the seas when the advantage was so lopsidedly on nature’s side. Almost as a tribute to those brave seafarers, he cleaned up the room.

  And the treasures he found! Trinkets and artifacts, masterfully crafted by human hands. He wanted to scoop everything up and take it with him, but of course Mitchell would have had his head if he did. There was one item he couldn’t resist, though, a small silver box, sealed and locked, perhaps a jewelry case, and bearing his own initials: JD.

  That night, after an exhausting stretch of work, the crew headed for their beds in the conference room. More interested in privacy, Del stayed behind on the bridge, assuring Doc Brady that he’d sleep better alone. Brady suspected that something was up, for the agitated look on Del’s face made it obvious that he had no intention of sleeping.

  Finally when he was alone, Del broke open the silver box and found a small pistol, a derringer, again engraved with his initials, a solid silver bullet, and a note:

  To my dearest Judith,

  My, but you are a difficult person for whom to buy a conventional birthday present! I have, however, proven my resourcefulness once again. In all modesty, I present to you, dear Judith, the prototype of my new pistol. You shall find that this firearm is well suited for a lady, as it is small, light, and easy to conceal. Others will find it on display in storefronts sometime next year, but you can always say that you received yours first!

  Your loving cousin,

  Henry

  “I’m keeping this,” Del breathed. He considered the others’-particularly Mitchell’s-reaction, then shoved the pistol and bullet out of sight, into the inside pocket of his shirt.

  By the sixth day all of the patches were in place and Reinheiser was ready to make the attempt to blow the water out of the sub. Their only chance was to use the atmospheric control unit to force great gushes of air into the flooded sections, displacing water out an open diving hatch. It proved a tedious and dangerous chore, for the physicist couldn’t possibly produce enough power to empty the entire ship all at once. Del and Thompson had to remain in the flooded sections and seal off each room as it cleared.

  The process had to be repeated several times; twice Del and Thompson weren’t quick enough in securing a room and the ocean charged back in as the pressurized air burped out a hatch in a great bubble. But the patches all held, and near the end of the day, Del closed the outside hatch, and the interior of the Unicorn was fairly dry once again.

  After a few hours of final clean-up, jettisoning everything that wasn’t nailed down, all was ready for their desperate attempt. No one gave any speeches or assurances; they all knew the odds that faced them.

  Thompson remained in the engine room, at the controls for blowing the ballast tanks, while the other six men used belts to strap themselves down on the bridge. Each of them held on to supplies of some sort-food, water, clothing. Corbin clutched an inflatable life raft, a going-away present from his father on the day the Unicorn had sailed out of Miami-a joke gift, really, for what use might a life raft be on a vessel destined to prowl at a depth of thirty thousand feet?

  Mitchell carried the heaviest pack: four rifles strapped together in a plastic bag. Del saw no need for the guns, and the sight of the volatile captain holding them disturbed him profoundly. He shook his head incredulously-guns wouldn’t save them from drowning. The irony of that thought brought a wry grin to his face, for if it came to a watery scramble, that heavy pack would likely take Mitchell down first.

  Yet the rifles were indeed a comfort to Captain Mitchell. He could accept that they might all die in the escape attempt; this was Reinheiser’s game and he’d let Reinheiser worry about it. Mitchell was more concerned with situations that he could control-situations that he and his guns could control.

  “Let it begin,” Reinheiser said when they had all settled.

  Mitchell took the com and called back to the engine room. “Thompson?”

  No reply.

  “Thompson!” Mitchell growled more loudly.

  “Here, sir.”

  Del and the others winced at the uneven timbre.

  “Our lives are in his hands?” Billy Shank remarked.

  Mitchell spoke calmly but firmly. “Blow the tanks.”

  But again no reply.

  A few more seconds of silence broke Mitchell’s patience. “Blow those goddamn tanks, mister!” he roared. “Now!”

  The sub shuddered with the release of water. Mitchell shut down the intercom and slammed the mike onto its holder.

  With another shudder, the Unicorn began to rise.

  Their moment of hope was upon them; as one, they clung to their bindings. They said nothing, each too engulfed by the probability of impending death to think of anything else, those feelings proving too personal and unresolved to be shared. Totally immersed in their work during the last few days, they hadn’t had time to come to terms with this delicate moment, and every one of them welcomed the contemplative silence.

  It didn’t last. Suddenly the door burst open and a terrified Thompson rushed in, tears streaming down his face.

  “Oh, no,” Doc Brady groaned.

  “I’ve got him,” Del shouted. He wriggled free of his restraints and tackled Thompson, pulling the trembling man down to the vacated seat.

  “Get the hatch!” Mitchell screamed.

  Del ran to the door. Dismay stole his breath when he got there. “The rest of them are open,” he cried. “All the way back!”

  The Unicorn thudded to a stop, the jolt knocking Del to his knees. He froze, fear seizing him, and did not try to rise.

  “We’ve hit the top of the cavern,” Reinheiser explained.

  “No time, man!” Brady cried to Del. “Get back.”

  D
el scrambled to secure the hatch, then dove down, trying to slip under the belts with Thompson, just as the Unicorn started moving again.

  Mitchell looked to Reinheiser. “Currents?”

  “Magnetic force,” the physicist answered. “Drawing us to the center of the field interaction.” Suspecting what was about to happen, he warned, “Hold on.”

  Just as Reinheiser finished the statement, it grabbed the sub. Like a great untamed beast, the newborn storm sprang upon the Unicorn , seeking an outlet for its uncontrollable power. It raged about in torment, aimless at first, but then suddenly finding a direction. Its power became purposeful anger, guided as if by vengeance toward the black portal, as if it were a sentient thing, blaming that area for its agony. The storm raced in, pulling the helpless sub along, and tore through the barrier.

  The men’s knuckles whitened under a grip of terror. Up and up they went, spinning and swirling. Up to a world that had once been their home.

  But not anymore.

  Chapter 5

  The Wrath of an Angry God

  THE MINUTES PASSED slowly as the Unicorn spun and bounced through the five-mile trip to the surface. Up and up she went, and then, as suddenly as it had started, the violent thrashing stopped.

  The Unicorn righted herself and sat calm, but the seven men did not release their grips on the belts. “We’ve stopped going up,” Del dared to whisper at length.

  “The surface,” Corbin added. “And we must have broken clear of the storm.” Wide smiles curled upon every lip.

  But even as the seven men began freeing themselves from the straps, the lights went out. And in the blackness an ominous sound became evident, a sound that every seagoing man hears in his worst nightmares. Somewhere toward the back of the Unicorn the ocean had again found its way in.

  “We’re taking on water!” Billy cried. As if to confirm his statement, the Unicorn tilted to starboard.