And the Deep Blue Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

the fo’c’sle head. The lookout reported the running lights. I’ll make it, he thought. Just a few more minutes. Then there was another sound, the ringing of a telephone, and he felt the hackles lift on his neck. Engine room calling the bridge? He kicked ahead.
    It was less than a hundred yards now. Then he heard the sound that struck terror in his heart, the jingle of the engine room telegraph. He tried to shout, but he had no breath. A great boil of water appeared under her counter, and he could hear the massive vibration set up by the engine going full ahead while she was still lying dead in the water. He clawed his way onto the raft and stood on his knees, fighting for breath so he could scream at them. They couldn’t hear him over the vibration. She began to move. He shouted, endlessly now, feeling himself engulfed in madness. She gathered way, beginning to swing to his right to get back on course, and her counter went past. Turbulence from the propeller spread outward, rocking the raft and spinning it around as she drew away from him in the night.
    The captain was on the wing of the bridge along with the first and second mates when Karen Brooke heard the telephone ring in the wheelhouse. The three of them went inside, and in a minute she heard the engine room telegraph. The deck trembled under her feet, and there was a noisy shuddering of the whole midships structure as the ship began to move slowly ahead. Then, strangely, above this sound, she thought she heard a voice crying out somewhere in the night in front of her. She moved back to the railing between the boat davits and looked out into the darkness where the faint path of light from the moon began to come abeam as the ship gathered steerageway and started to turn. She thought she heard the strange cry again. Then she gasped as she saw something flat and dark on the surface of the sea less than a hundred yards away. Extending upward from it was the unmistakable silhouette of a man violently waving his arms. She stood frozen, knowing it was impossible, but with the ship still moving very slowly the figure was caught for several seconds in the path of light and there could be no doubt of what she saw. She wheeled and ran toward the bridge. The second mate was just emerging from the wheelhouse.
    “A man!” she cried out, pointing. “There’s a man out there, on a raft or something.”
    He stared blankly, startled by the suddenness of it, but then turned and looked in the direction she was pointing. She ran out onto the wing of the bridge, her arm still extended. “Right out there! I heard him shout! He was waving!” But the raft was out of the moon path now and lost in the darkness behind it. The captain emerged from the wheelhouse. She whirled to him.
    “Captain! Stop! Back up!” She realized she must sound like an idiot; what was the nautical term?
    “What is it, Mrs. Brooke?” he asked.
    “She says she saw a man on a raft,” the second mate said.
    She saw the exchanged glance. Passengers! The ship was gaining speed, the raft falling farther astern by the minute. She was frantic. Wasn’t there any way she could make them believe it? The captain had reached into a box below the bridge railing and lifted out a pair of binoculars. “Back there!” she cried out again, gesturing. “He was in the path of the moonlight! I heard him shout!”
    The captain searched the area with the glasses. He lowered them and said, in the tone of one indulging a child, “It was probably a piece of dunnage, Mrs. Brooke. Or some weed.”
    “Captain, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not drunk! It was a man! Wouldn’t he show on the radar?”
    “Not on our radar.” It was the chief mate, who had emerged from the wheelhouse. He spoke to the captain. “Maybe she did see something. We’d better take a look.” Before the captain could reply, he stepped past them and lifted a life ring from its brackets on the rear railing of the bridge. It was attached to a canister. He