Chapter 14: The Return to the Scars

By ten o'clock that night, a howling north-easterly gale was rising off the sea, driving dark, ragged clouds across the face of a full moon.

Arthur and Caleb sat in the stern of a heavy wooden coble, hired from an old fisherman at Sandside who asked no questions when offered two gold sovereigns. Caleb worked the heavy oars, his broad back straining against the pull of the ebb tide as they cleared the shelter of the East Pier and struck out into the open waters of the bay.

The sea was white with foam, deep troughs pulling the small wooden boat down before lifting it high onto the crests of the black waves. In the middle of the boat, wrapped in heavy lead sheet stripped from the roof of Arthur's workshop and bound with thick copper wire, rested the glass plate.

Arthur sat in the bow, his hands clutched tight to the gunwale. His face was soaked in salt spray, his eyes fixed on the dark, menacing headland of Ravenscar looming three miles to the south.

"The tide is dropping fast!" Caleb shouted over the roar of the wind and surf. "The Bay Scars will be exposed in half an hour! If we hit those shale ledges in this swell, the boat will be smashed to splinters!"

"We don't land on the beach!" Arthur yelled back, pointing toward the dark gap between the headland and the open sea where the water churned into white mist. "The logbook said the Dolphin lost her anchor in the deep gutter off the outer reef! That’s where the sea floor drops into thirty fathoms!"

Caleb pulled hard on the port oar, turning the coble’s bow directly toward the line of roaring breakers that marked the edge of the Bay Scars.

As they approached the outer reef, the water around the boat began to change color. The dark green sea turned a milky, phosphorescent gray, glowing with a faint, unholy light beneath the surface. The temperature of the air dropped instantly, freezing the salt spray on Arthur's coat into stiff, white armor.

From the dark water beneath the coble's keel came a sound that made Caleb freeze mid-stroke.

It was the deep, resonant clanking of an iron anchor chain, being paid out link by link into the abyss below them.

"She’s dropping her mark!" Caleb roared.

The lead-wrapped package in the bottom of the boat began to vibrate. The copper wire binding the lead sheet hummed like a struck tuning fork, glowing with a faint, violet electric discharge.

Arthur lunged forward, grabbing the heavy lead bundle in his arms. The cold radiated through the heavy metal, biting through his wool gloves and deadening his fingers.

He dragged the package to the gunwale, looking down into the boiling, phosphorescent churn of the outer reef.

Through the clear, glowing water twenty feet below the keel, Arthur saw it: the black, splintered hulk of the Dolphin, resting on its side on the seabed where it had lay for twenty years. But extending upward from its hawsehole was not a rusted chain of iron, but a column of brilliant, blinding silver light, stretching straight up toward the surface toward the coble.

"Hold us steady, Caleb!" Arthur screamed.

Arthur raised the lead-bound plate high above his head. He looked once more toward the dark, timeless cliffs of Yorkshire, then turned his gaze down into the glowing abyss.

"Go back to the salt," Arthur cried out, his voice swallowed by the roar of the gale.

He threw the heavy lead package into the sea.

The moment the metal broke the surface, a sound like a tearing sheet of canvas echoed across the bay. A flash of white, chemical light erupted beneath the waves, illuminating the entire seabed for half a mile around the reef.

Through the glowing water, Arthur watched the lead bundle sink straight into the open hawsehole of the sunken hulk. As it touched the rotted timber of the deck, the column of silver light collapsed in on itself with a muffled, thundering explosion that sent a plume of white foam forty feet into the night air.

The violent vibration ceased instantly.

The phosphorescent glow faded from the water, leaving only the black, cold waves of the North Sea rolling over the Bay Scars under the winter moon.

Caleb rested his weight against the oars, gasping for air as the coble lifted gently on a clean, rolling swell. He looked over at Arthur, who sat huddled in the bow, staring down at his yellow-stained fingers.

The white frost-stain on Arthur's thumb was gone, replaced by clean, pink skin.

Far out on the horizon, where the sea met the night sky, the wind died down to a soft, clean whisper, carrying with it only the familiar, bitter scent of salt and open water.