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plain professional thieves. If there did happen to be anything left worth
salvaging, I didn't want to see it pillaged, did I, by bungling tyros and
aquatic muggers?'
'I guess not,' smiled Edward. 'They did the same thing in England, didn't
they? Pretending to be diving on the Royal George, when in fact they were
looking for the Mary Rose. It was the only way they could throw the scrap
merchants off the scent. A scrap merchant would have dynamited the Mary Rose
to pieces, just for the sake of her bronze cannon.'
Duglass Evelith beckoned to Enid, and asked her in a hoarse whisper, 'Bring me
the charts out of the chart-table. There's a good girl.'
'Enid's your grand-daughter?' asked Forrest, as she went off to get the maps.
Duglass Evelith stared at him. 'My grand-daughter?' he asked, as if he were
mystified by the question.
Forrest actually blushed. 'Well, you know,' he flustered. 'It was just an
assumption.'
Old man Evelith nodded his head, but offered no clarification as to who Enid
might actually be. Maid? Mis-230
tress? Companion? It wasn't really our business, but I think all of us would
have loved to know.
'Here,' said Enid, bringing a large folded chart of the approaches to Salem
Harbour, and spreading it out on the table. Again, that dark glimpse of red
nipples against sheer black fabric; strangely arousing and yet equally
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frightening, too. Enid caught me looking at her, and looked straight back at
me, without smiling, without any hint of possible friendship. The thin
sunlight illuminated her hair like a black coronet.
Duglass Evelith opened a drawer under the table and produced a large sheet of
tracing paper, on which coordinates and transit bearings were already marked.
He laid the tracing paper over the chart; although only he knew exactly how it
had to be keyed into position, so the chart and the overlay would have been
useless to anybody else. One bearing ran through the tip of Juniper Point and
the southernmost head of Winter Island; the other bearing ran through Quaker
Hill, cleaving a sharp line through Quaker Lane Cottage. About 420 metres off
the Granitehead shore an X was marked: the supposed position where the David
Dark had gone down, over 290 years ago.
Edward looked at me in excitement. The X was no more than 250 metres
south-south-west of where we had been searching the seabed yesterday morning,
but under the sea, with its currents and debris and whirling mud, 250 metres
was as good as a mile away.
Duglass Evelith watched us with mild amusement. Then he folded up the chart,
and laid it to one side, and slipped the overlay back in his drawer.
'You can have this information on several conditions,' he said. 'Firstly, that
you never once mention my name in connection with your work. Secondly, that
you keep me in daily touch with what you are doing, and that you show me
everything, no matter how insignificant, that you bring up from the seabed.
Thirdly, and most importantly, that if you locate the copper vessel in which
the demon is supposed to be incarcerated, that you do not attempt
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to open it, but that you pack it at once in ice and bring it here, by
refrigerated truck.'
'You want it here?'
'Do you think you can handle it?' Duglass Evelith demanded. 'If it should
actually arise, and begin to wield its terrible powers again, do you think you
could give it what it craves?'
Forrest said, 'I'm not sure I like this at all.'
But Edward said, 'I don't have any particular objection, provided we can have
access to whatever it is, once we've brought it here. We'll want to make all
kinds of tests. Normal, as well as paranormal. Bone analysis, carbon dating,
ultra-violet scanning, X-ray. Then we'll want to go through the Paarsman test
for kinetic energy, and a hypno-volition test.'
Duglass Evelith thought about this, and then shrugged. 'As long as you don't
turn my home into an experimental laboratory.'
Edward said, 'I have to be quite straight with you, Mr Evelith. We still lack
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