The Ebb Tide by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

cliff and find ourselves no nearer salvation than we ever were.
    Again I opened the air valve, but the flow was feeble, a tired hiss, and the air in the chamber was distressingly thick. I tried to distract myself by watching our progress, but it was too frustratingly slow, and there was little of interest to be seen in the river, which was perpetually murky now in the slack water. Hasbro, who had either been asleep or in deep meditation, said, “I beg your pardon, sir?” and I had no idea what he meant until I heard the echo of my own voice in my ears, and I realized that I had been talking out loud, like a mad man, and with no idea what I had said.
    “Nothing,” I told him with the rictus of a smile. “Just musing.”
    “Best not to talk at all,” St. Ives said.
    I decided to try closing my eyes, but despite my best efforts, I couldn’t rid my mind of the watery clanks and thumpings that accompanied our slow progress across the bottom of the Thames. Abruptly there came into my mind the morbid notion that I was nailed into a coffin and had been dumped into the sea, and that I was suffocating in the darkness. My eyes shot open and I sucked in a great gasping breath of air, but there was no nourishment in it, and I sat there goggling like a rock cod drawn out of deep water.
    “Are you quite all right, sir?” Hasbro asked.
    I nodded a feeble lie, but noticed through the port just then that bits and pieces of floating debris had apparently begun swirling past us from downriver, and that the clouds of silt were clearing much more quickly. I was filled with a sense of doom. We had missed our tide, it seemed to me, and I was persuaded that we should throw open the hatch and try our luck with the river, abandoning the loathsome chamber…. Hasbro, God bless him, handed me the whisky flask in that dark moment, and I took a grateful draft before handing it back to him.
    Very shortly we began to make a certain haste over a flat and sandy bottom, and my spirits lifted. I was conscious of the water brightening around us, and up through the port I could see what looked like a silver rippling window, which must, I knew, be the surface of the river. Then the chamber was out into the atmosphere, the water level declining along the glass. We staggered ashore until we were waist deep and could go no farther. Gravity, St. Ives told us, had gotten the best of us as our buoyancy decreased, and we risked breaking our legs if we ventured onto dry land.
    I swung out of the open hatch like a man plucked from the grave, and leapt down into the river as into a bath, inflating my lungs with air that was as sweet as spring water, splashing my way to shore like a frolic at Blackpool. Recalling that moment of freedom even now makes me wax metaphoric, although the memory fades quickly, and I’m reminded of how close I had come to shaming myself with my fears and my weaknesses. If I were a younger man today, with a more frail sensitivity, I might revise this account, and cast a more stoic light on myself, perhaps adding a small moment of personal glory. But be it only ink on paper, that would be to commit the same fearful folly again, and with a lie on top of it. Surely there’s more virtue in the truth.
    We had made our way, we soon discovered, to the lower edge of the Erith Marshes, almost to the bend above Long Reach. No one had seen us emerge—another bit of luck. Three hours later the diving chamber sat atop the bed of a wagon, affixed to a swivel crane and fenced in by empty crates to disguise its shape, all of it tied down securely and covered in canvas. We found ourselves on our way merrily enough, north to Harrogate now, where St. Ives told us we would replenish the compressed air at Pillsworth’s Chemical Laboratories, and then on across the Dales and around the top of Morecambe Bay for a rendezvous with Merton’s Uncle Fred at his cottage in Grange-over-Sands. We were in need of a sand pilot, you see, to go along with our map and our