The Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online

windows, organ music and the echoes of coughing rebounding from the church roof. it was ritual with which he was willing to put up every so often for the sake of standing in the community. But here there was something dreadfully embarrassing in this big man oblivious of all else, kneeling, arms upraised, conversing directly with God.
    He did not know where to look. He stole a glance at his wife and saw that she was staring at Scott with fascination, but her lips were moving. She was one of those thin, fine-boned, American women who from sensational girlish beauty had developed into an even lovelier middle-age; ash blonde hair turned a shade darker, but the eyes still the same blue, lively and young and the faint lines appearing about the mouth recording the humour, the courage and the goodwill with which she had coped with the struggles of producing and raising a family, and keeping a husband.
    He saw splinters of glass shining in her hair, reached over and plucked them Out. She smiled a little tremulously and said, 'I've prayed, too.' But in her mind she was wondering to whom Scott had been speaking -- one of those bearded figures of God on a billowing cloud from the Sistine Chapel, or the overcoated, slouch-hatted figure of the football coach pacing the sidelines?
    Belle Rosen, clutching her husband's arm said, 'Manny, what's happened to us? Maybe we should say a prayer, like, ourselves.'
    Manny answered, 'it's years since we've been to temple. Now we should be asking?' But automatically his hand reached inside his shirt-front for the mezuzah that should have been hanging from a chain about his neck, but wasn't. The Rosens were of a generation which had long since given up orthodoxy.
    The weird, static moments continued. The capsized ship should long since have given a final lurch and plunged to the bottom. Instead she ceased all movement and seemed as solidly planted there in the still ocean as a rock, a long, dark whale-back beneath the emerging starlight.
    The complete relaxation, the result of their alcoholism, had saved The Beamer and Pam, his girl, from nothing worse than a shaking up. It was she, with a strong arm, who lifted him up and held him to his feet, both now stone-cold sober. But though he knew he was no longer drunk, the horrors around him made him uncertain that he was not under hallucination; Scott and Miss Kinsale kneeling, lights going on and off up from the floor, the stink and the noise frightened him badly. He said, 'Pam, am I all right?'
    She held fast to him and whispered, 'Don't worry, I'm here. I'll look after you.'
    James Martin, owner of The Elite Haberdashery Shop in Evanston, Illinois, got to his feet unaided and made for where the grand staircase had been, and then wished he had not. He was a dry little man with the smooth skin and thin lips of the Midwesterner. The eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles were alert but he would have been easy to lose in a crowd. He looked like no one and everyone who was in the business of selling. When he reached the area, it was no longer there, but instead at a depth of six feet below the new floor line, was a large pool of water and black oil. One of the emergency lights still functioning on the upside-down stairs gave the surface an iridescence of many colours.
    With a great blobbing sound a bubble burst upwards from it and inside the bubble he caught momentary sight of the head and shoulders of a human figure, but could not tell whether it was man, woman or child, for it was covered in oil. A hand reached forth and grasped at nothing, then the apparition vanished. Martin crouched down at the edge of the pool and was sick and then threw himself backwards and away from it, so that it could not claim him.
    Mike Rogo had got his wife up off the floor; she was still on the verge of hysteria with her teeth chattering. The bunch of false curls attached to the back of her head had been knocked askew and the tight sheath dress stained with gravy. Her state of