The silent red man yet clung to him. Clay had known few people smaller than he—indeed they had all been children or elders. Now he found himself being wrestled by a child-sized red man with the strength of hard-working Mister Eager and the determination of man-slaying Captain Evenstar.

Of the two fiends who had made it into the launch the other had its head turned to splattered watermelon by Fat Sam swinging that terrible oar. But this one, this red devil with hair like an imported Chinese rug that Sam had once been set to brush, this devil would not let go, even as Sam broke his legs with that oar. The sound of those stout red legs snapping was hideous to hear. It was all Fat Sam could do, so as not to hit Scrawny Clay.

Of particular horror was the creeping fingerless hand that Clay—in his only noteworthy act during his brief stint as the worst and scrawniest marine on the seven seas—pruned of its fingers with the very shovel they had buried the Captain’s daughter with. The creeping hand, pulling itself toward Clay’s face with its lone digit, the thumb, was nearing his chin. The other strong arm was wrapped around his waist and clutching his pants bottoms. And that face, that dark, tireless face, the color of an old penny, with bloodshot eyes of determination, was looking into his eyes, even as it inched forward, biting Clay’s shirt and pulling itself up with the strength of its bulging neck, for Sam had clearly turned the legs to pulp.

Clay turned for the sideboard in an attempt to fling himself overboard and drag the fiend with him, worthless as he was to their effort, so that Sam might survive and make the sloop. This action along with whatever else bodies and sea were doing swamped the entire launch and Cruel Mamma Sea, who he had regarded as his savior a few short moments past, flooded in and he slipped out into her depths with a living weight dragging him to his watery doom!

For a moment he craned his narrow head on his skinny neck to gulp in his last breath of air—then the fiend dragged him down.

The strong shadow of a man, for there was only light above, dim as it was, seemed to be climbing him to get to the light—the surface! But the harder the fiend climbed up Clay’s scrawny form the deeper they sunk, until they were all a tangle among some weeds.

The large round head must have been looking straight into his face, for it blotted out the dim light of the nearly dead day above. The whole hand and the thumb hand then release their grasp on his clothes and the maimed hand patted him on the chest as if there were no hard feelings. The shadow image of the stout man, who would have been red under the sun but was the same color as any other person down here in the darkened abyss, then began rising toward the surface.

He began to float up toward the surface without the lead weight of the fiend clutching to him. Then his ankle caught in the weeds and he stayed put, bobbing on the sea bottom, his hands and knees brushed by weeds that likewise bobbed like grass in a liquid wind.

No sound came to his ears. He looked up at the world that it seemed he had sunken beneath. The dim light of the surface was like a gray sky overhead, the water around was like night in the country. And the things of the surface world, where they intruded, were inky black. Above and behind him was the long sleek black outline of the Blue Baby Beth, a fine line she cut even from the bottom.

Just ahead, where the horizon of this undersea world would be, was the outline of the launch, with some smaller inkblots bobbing around it. A big round struggling mass was flailing from the launch to the sloop—that would be Fat Sam, a fit swimmer to survive a dunking at sea for sure.

Just as Clay considered the rising fiend with some compassion, a long sinuous form of pure neutral menace arced across the vault of this watery hell. The thing was half again the size of the launch and nearly its length, and it hit the rising man like a train plowing into a cow, only if the train had a mouth to open in which to gobble the cow.

As the watery world above and its lurid sky became obscured by a great cloud of spreading ink and the tail of the monster passed overhead, Clay squatted and tore furiously at the weeds around his feet until he was loose. Then, he let loose his air in a mass of shooting bubbles and pushed off the bottom, propelling his narrow body toward the surface. Being scrawny with now fat or muscle to speak of might make for a poor swimmer, but he found himself to be a first class arrow off the bottom as he flew from the water and came to the surface amid a scene that boggled the mind.