Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror/Volume 2/Number 3/Sea-Tiger

by Henry S. Whitehead

A merman and mermaid swim under the sea, a large fish between them and seaweed beneath

She had succumbed in the direful struggle with the sea-beast.

Sea-Tiger

By Henry S. Whitehead

Merman and Mermaid were they in the drowning Hewitt's revealing vision.

Arthur Hewitt's first intimation of the terrific storm which struck the Barbadian off Hatteras, en route for the West Indies, was a crash which awakened him out of uneasy sleep in the narrow berth of his cabin. When he staggered up to the saloon-deck the next morning after an extremely uncomfortable, sleepless night, he looked out of the ports upon a sea which transcended anything he had ever seen. The Barbadian, heeling and hanging, wallowed in the trough of cross seas which wrenched her lofty bridge-deck.

A steward, who was having a rather difficult time keeping his feet, fetched him a sandwich and a cup of coffee. In a little while two other passengers appeared for breakfast: one a British salesman, and the other an American ship's officer, out of a professional berth and going to Antigua to help take off a sugar crop. The three men, warmed now by the coffee and the comfortable security of the lounge, snored and chattered intimately.

Nevertheless, a sinister foreboding seemed to hang over them. At last Matthews, the American, voiced it plainly:

“I hope she'll make St. Thomas! Well—I’ve always heard that Captain Baird knows his business; a good sailorman, they say."

“Do you think there'll be any let-up when we get into the Gulf Stream?" This was the Englishman, breaking a long, dreary silence.

“More likely a let-down, I'd say,” replied the pessimistic Matthews. “She’ll be worse, if anything, in my judgment."

This gloomy prediction justified itself the following morning. The Barbadian had entered the Gulf Stream, and the malevolent fury of the sea increased with daylight. Hewitt came on deck, and, leaning against the jamb of a partly opened hatch on the protected lee-side, looked out upon a world of heaving gray-green water with that feeling of awe which the sea in all its many moods invariably awakened in him. A gust of wind caught his unbuttoned coat, and out of a pocket and onto the wet, heaving deck slid the morocco-bound Testament which his mother had given him years before.

He stepped out through the hatchway, cautiously, making his way precariously across the deck to where it lay caught in the metal scupper. He arrived safely against the rail, which he gripped firmly with one hand, while he stooped to recover the book with the other. As he bent forward the tail-end of an enormous overtopping wave which had caught the vessel under her weather-quarter, caught him and raised his body like a feather over the rail's top.

But Hewitt was not cast into the sea. With a frantic, instinctive movement, he clung to the rail as his body struck violently against the ship's side.

With the Barbadian’s righting herself he found himself hanging on like grim death, his body dangling perilously over the angry waters, the Testament clutched firmly in his other hand.

He attempted to set his feet against one of the lower railings, to hook his legs about a stanchion. He almost succeeded, and would doubtless have been back upon the deck in safety had not the crest of the following wave dislodged his one-hand hold on the rail. The angry sea took him to itself, while the laboring ship, bounding into the teeth of the gale, bore on, all unconcerned over his sudden, unceremonious departure.

The incidents of Hewitt's life marched through his consciousness with an incredible rapidity. He remembered his mother poignantly—his mother dead these eight years—and a salt tear mingled with the vast saltiness of this cold, inhospitable ocean which had taken him to its disastrous embrace.

Down and down into the watery inferno he sank, weighted down with his winter boots and heavy overcoat. Strangely enough, he was not afraid, but he responded to the major mechanical impulses of a drowning man—the rigid holding of his breath, the desperate attempts to keep his head toward the surface so as to stay the sinking process, the well-nigh mechanical prayer to God.

His lungs were bursting, it seemed! Hot pain seared him, the red pain of unendurable pressures. He must resist as long as he had consciousness. He clamped his jaws desperately together.

It was calm down here, and dark! Here was no trace of the raging tempest on the surface, that tumultuous surface of lashed fury. The water seemed constantly heavier, more opaque, a vast, pervading indigo.

The pain and the burning pressure were gone now. He seemed no longer to sink. Nor did he rise, apparently. Probably he could not exhale his breath now if he wanted to. Well, he did not want to. It was no longer cold. Here was a world of calm, of perfect peace. Drowning is an easy death, after all. . . .

He hoped the Barbadian would make St. Thomas. . . .

His last conscious sensation was of a gentle sinking through a vast, imponderable blueness, which seemed pervading the universe, a restful blueness to which one could yield readily. He relaxed, let himself go, with no desire to struggle. He sank and sank, it seemed. . . .

***

He lay now upon a beach, his chin propped in his cupped hands, his elbows deep in the warm sand. It was from this warmth that he derived his first conscious sensation. A soft sea-wind, invigorating from its long contact with illimitable expanses of tropic seas, blew freshly. He felt very weary, and, it seemed, he had newly awakened out of a very protracted sleep. He turned his head at some slight sound and looked into the face of a girl who lay on the sand beside him.

He realized, as the march of events passed through his mind, that he must have gone through the gate of death. This, then, was that next world of which he had heard vaguely, all his life long. It was puzzling, somewhat. He was dead. He knew he must be dead. Do the dead lie on tropical beaches, under faint moonlight, and think, and feel this fresh wind from the sea? The dead, surely, do not dream. Perhaps they do dream. He had no knowledge, no experience, of course. He had read tales of after-death. Most of them, he remembered, revealed the surprise of the hero at the unexpectedness of his surroundings.

The girl touched him gently on the shoulder, and her hand was unbelievably cool and soothing. As he turned and looked at her in a kind of terror, the faint moonlight abruptly faded. Then the rim of the sun broke, red and sharp, like a blazing scimitar blade, across the horizon. The leaves of many trees stirred, welcoming the tropic day. Little monkeys swung and chattered overhead. A great flaming macaw sped, arrow-like, across the scope of his vision. The girl spoke to him:

“We must be gone to the sea.”

The girl moved delicately towards the place where, near at hand, the turquoise sea lapped softly against weed-strewn boulders and freshly gleaming white sand. As he, too, induced by some compelling impulse beyond the scope of his understanding, moved instinctively to seek the refuge of the sea, he saw his companion clearly for the first time. Stupefied, incredulous, he glanced down at his own body, and saw, glistening, iridescent in the new light of fresh dawn, a great flashing, gleaming tail like that of some fabled, stupendous denizen of enchanted deeps. Then, his wonderment losing itself in a great exultation, he followed his mermaid into the shining, welcoming waters. . . .

On an early afternoon—for the sun was high in the heavens—he emerged from the sea into the shallows of that sandy beach where he had awakened to amphibian existence seemingly ages ago. Slowly, painfully, he dragged himself upon the warm sand. He was very weary, for he had finished an enormous swim, away from the scene of a fearful combat which he had waged with a now dimly remembered monster of the great deeps of the warm sea. His companion, who, during these long, dimly remembered eras, had been dear to him, was gone. She had succumbed in the direful struggle with the sea-beast. His heartache transcended the immediate painfulness and fatigue of his bruised and weary body.

He had had his vengeance, though. Beside her body lay that of the sea-beast, crustaceous, horrible, slain by him after a titanic struggle, mangled in the imponderable ooze. . . .

He rested at last, prone upon the yielding, sun-soaked sand. The insistent light of the glaring sun troubled him, and he moved impatiently. A vague murmur, too, was disturbingly apparent. He decided, wearily, to shift his position to the nearby shade of a palm grove. He turned over, slowly, painfully.

Then the light from the sun smote his eyes, attuned to the cool dimness of the sea-deeps, and as he moved towards the palms he raised a hand to his brow. That disquieting murmur took form abruptly, became intelligible. It seemed, somehow, to take on the familiarity of a remembered human voice. He lowered his hand, puzzled, disturbed, and found himself looking at an electric-light bulb. In its light he saw three men sitting on a leather sofa. He rose on his elbow, still painfully, for he was very weary after that dire combat, and peered at them. He now fixed his dazed stare on Matthews, who was in the middle of the row, and mumbled some incoherent words. The man seated at the end of the sofa rose hastily, and came towards him. He saw that it was Hegeman, the Barbadian’s doctor.

“Back awake, eh?” It was Hegeman’s cheerful voice. The doctor placed a hand on Hewitt’s pulse. “You’ll do,” he announced confidently.

Matthews was standing beside the doctor. Over Matthews’ shoulder Hewitt could see, peering, the spectacled face of the salesman. Matthews was speaking:

“We were through the Gulf Stream a day ago, and the sun’s out. It was a narrow squeak! Old Baird should have the Board of Trade medal for getting you. Thought you’d never come up!”

“A bit battered but right as rain, what!” The Englishman had added his word of cheer.

“You’ll be on your pins in a day or two,” said the doctor. “Keep still for the present.” Hewitt nodded. He did not want to talk. He had too much to get settled in his mind. Those experiences! Or what seemed to be experiences, the chimeras of the unconscious mind.

“One of the stewards saw you go,” added Hegeman. “Two of your teeth are chipped, where you clamped your jaws to hold your breath. Plucky thing to do. It saved your life.

Hewitt held out a heavy hand. The doctor took it and placed it gently by his side. “Go back to sleep,” he ordered, and the three filed out.

***

During the remainder of the voyage Hewitt slowly recovered from the severe shock of his long immersion in wintry seawater. He was chiefly occupied though, with the strange history of his experience, which continued to stand out quite sharply in his mind. He could not shake off the notion that it had been, somehow, a real experience. Why—he could remember the details of day after day of it. He seemed to have acquired some unique knowledge of the ways of the sea’s great deeps: the barely luminous darkness of animal phosphorescence; the strange monsters; the incredible cold of that world of pressure and dead ooze; the effortless motion through the water; the strange grottoes; above all, the eery austere companionship of the mer-woman and the final dreadful battle. . . . His mind was filled to overflowing with intimate details of what seemed a long, definite, regulated, amphibian life, actually lived!

There remained, permanently, even after the process of time had done its work in rendering most of the details indistinct in his mind, the desire for the sea: the overwhelming urge to go into, under, the water; to swim for incalculable distances; to lie on dim, sandy depths, the light, blue and faint, from above, among the swarming, glowing, harmless parrot-fish. And, deeper than all, in this persistent urge of consciousness, was the half-buried, basic desire to rive and tear and rend—a curious, almost inexplicable, persistent set of wholly new instincts, which disturbed his mind when he allowed himself to dwell on them. He looked forward to the first swim in the Caribbean, after landing at his port, St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands.

Fully restored to his ordinary physical vigor, he joined a swimming party on the afternoon following his arrival in Frederiksted. There had been rumors of sharks, but his hosts hastened to reassure their guests. No! Sharks were virtually negligible, anyhow. Sharks were cowardly creatures, easily frightened away from any group of swimmers. If it were a barracuda, now—that would be quite another matter. Over in Porto Rico, so report had it, there had been a case of a barracuda attacking an American school-teacher. Terribly injured—permanently, it was said. Months in the hospital, poor fellow.

But, barracuda rarely troubled the bathing beaches. Occasionally, yes, one would take the bait of one of the Negro fishermen, far out in their little boats, and then the fisherman, if he were agile, would cut his line and row, gray-faced, inshore, perhaps not to venture out again for days. They were the sea-tigers, the barracudas.

Their attack was a fiendish thing. With its eighteen-inch jaw, and its rows of rip-saw teeth, it would charge, and charge again, tearing its helpless victim to ribbons, stripping flesh from bones with relentless avidity. There was no escape, it seemed, once those lightning rushes had begun. They came in such rapid succession that unless the victim were almost on shore there was no escape. Yes, a kind Providence save us from a barracuda!

The party, a gay one, entered the water under the declining afternoon sun. The beach here shelved steeply, four or five steps being quite enough to reach swimming depth. The water was so clear, over its white, sandy bottom, that a swimmer, floating face downward, could see bottom clearly, and count the little parrot-fish, like flashing sunbeams, as they sported about, apparently near enough to be gathered up by extending the hand; a curious, amusing delusion.

Hewitt swam easily, lazily, revelling with satisfaction in the stimulating clear water which in these latitudes is like a sustained caress to the body.

He had never felt so much at ease in the water before. It seemed, however, quite natural to him now. It fitted, precisely, into what had grown to be his expectations during the past few days on the ship. It was as though latent, untried powers deep within him had been stimulated and released by the strange, mental experience he had undergone during those few hours of his unconsciousness. He dived deeply, and all the processes involved—the holding of the breath, the adjustment of muscular actions and reactions, the motions of underwater swimming—were as natural and effortless as though he had been, he told himself musingly, really amphibious.

Unnoticed by him, the remainder of the swimming party, only about half of whom he had met, retired to the beach and spread themselves in little sociable groups along the sandy edge. A few lingered in the shallows.

He was floating on his back, the little waves of that calm sea lapping against his cheeks when he heard faintly the terrified, cutting scream of a girl. He treaded water, and looked towards the beach, where he saw the various members of the large party rushing towards a young girl whom he had not especially noticed before. The girl was one of those who had remained in the shallows, and as he looked he saw many hands extended towards her, and drawing her upon the sand, and he saw, too, a pinkish froth of fresh blood about the place from which she had emerged.

Something seemed to snap inside his brain. That terrible, atavistic, inexplicable sense of combat, the desire to rend and tear suffused him. In the grip of this strange, primitive, savage urge, he turned abruptly and dived straight down to where a flickering gray shadow passed; to where an enormous barracuda slowed to turn for its lightning rush at its second victim. Hewitt sped down like a plummet, exulting. . . .

A moment later the attention of the group on the beach was distracted from the young girl whose foot had been cruelly gashed by the sea-tiger’s teeth, to a seething, foaming, writhing thing that rose from the calm surface of the sea a hundred feet out from the beach, struggled furiously on the lashed surface for a few seconds, and then as abruptly disappeared in a tortured mass of foam. A sunburned young Navy doctor went on binding up the girl’s foot, but the rest, wonder-stricken, silent, scanned the surface eagerly for another glimpse of this strange, titanic combat. “What is it?” “What can it be?” The questions ran from mouth to mouth.

The barracuda rose again, this time within twenty feet of the beach, and Hewitt lay locked along the steel-gray back, his hands closed in a viselike grip about the terrible jaws, his tensed muscles corded with the fearful strain. Over and over, sidewise, backwards, forward, moved fish and man as one, locked together in dives and turns and dashes so swift as to baffle the gaping eyes of the amazed onlookers, standing now in a wondering, intrigued row upon the edge of the sand. And always, with great, powerful lunges of feet and sweeps of elbows and hand and knees, now above, now beneath, but ever unrelaxed in that deadly grip, on the frothing surface or in the quiet depths, Hewitt forced his demon antagonist towards the beach.

In the course of their fourth emergence, the two, rolling over and over upon the bottom sand of the shore shallows, shot out upon the beach, and Hewitt, finding his feet, with a great wrench, raised the sea-tiger in his hands and with a great sweeping motion which bent the iron-like head and its cruel jaws towards the rigid, mackerel-like tail, cracked the giant killer’s backbone, and flung the barracuda down on the sand where it lay, crushed and broken, writhing out its life in convulsive leaps.

Hewitt took several deep, restoring breaths, and the killing-lust passed from him, the strange urge satisfied by his successful struggle. The members of the swimming party slowly gathered about him. There was, it appeared, nothing much to say. One of the men cautiously rolled over the crushed barracuda with a tentative foot. Hewitt raised his eyes and looked towards the young girl, who was now standing lightly on the bandaged foot, supported by the Navy doctor.

She looked back at Hewitt, and there was a great wonder in her sea-blue eyes. The fresh wind moved her coppery hair, now released from the rubber bathing-cap.

Oblivious of the chorus of admiration and bewilderment of the rest of the swimming party, Hewitt gazed at her, awed, overcome, feeling suddenly weak. For—wonder of wonders!—leaning on the arm of the solicitous young doctor, there stood before him the perfect embodiment of his sea companion, that strange, alluring, product of his recent subconscious experience, his extraordinary dream.

He drew several long breaths, to steady himself. Now the remarks of the swimmers began to break through his dazed consciousness, and he came to himself. He stepped towards the injured girl, fumbling in his rapidly clearing mind for some suitable expression of sympathy. . . .

Abruptly the members of the swimming party fell silent, realizing that they stood here in the presence of some inexplicable drama; of something subtle and vague, but something unmistakably finished, appropriate.

“I hope you were not hurt very badly,” was all that Hewitt could manage.

The girl answered him not a word but looked steadily into his face, and Hewitt knew that here was the beginning of his real life.