a dangerous place. Come on. Let me go first.”
Crowding past Tom, Rawlins hurried as fast as the constantly deepening water and the darkness would permit and presently, though to Tom it seemed hours, a lighter space appeared ahead and a few moments later they once more were standing at the bottom of the river.
They had turned to retrace their steps towards their own dock and were following along the old wall when once more they were halted in their tracks. Again to their ears, borne to them by the radio waves, came the harsh foreign words.
So close did the words sound in their ears that instinctively, without stopping to think that the speakers might be hundreds of feet or even yards distant, the two crouched back in a recess of the masonry, flattening themselves against the slime-covered, weed-draped stones and gazing apprehensively towards the spot where the old sewer pierced the wall.
[CHAPTER IX—THE BATTLE BENEATH THE RIVER]
As they crouched there, Frank’s voice was taking on a frightened tone and Tom could now hear it much more plainly. But Tom’s mind was filled with the danger of being discovered and he scarcely dared reply, for somehow, although there was no foundation for his fears, he was filled with a terrible dread of these under-sea workers, these unknown mysterious divers who had lifted the ominous-looking metal cylinder through the trapdoor in the disused sewer. That, even if they heard him and his friends, they could not trail them or locate them under water never occurred to him. In fact, he had quite forgotten that he and Rawlins were under water or were as invisible to others a few yards away as other objects were to them. He felt as though he could be as easily seen as if on land, and that, if he spoke, his words would at once betray his whereabouts.
But he also realized that Frank’s voice could be heard by others as well as by himself and so, steeling himself to the effort, he called back, “It’s all right. Don’t worry. Stop talking and listen.”
Instantly, Frank’s voice ceased and Tom drew a breath of relief and then he gulped and pressed close to Rawlins, for before him in the water, as if attracted by the sounds of his voice, the two dim forms of the strange divers once more appeared. For a space they remained motionless as though listening and perspiration broke out on Tom’s forehead and chills ran up and down his spine as he heard distinctly the sounds of low-toned words in the same guttural tongue, and he was certain, positive, that his voice had been heard, that the others were striving to locate him, and that at any moment Frank or Henry might become curious or impatient and speak. In his terrified mind he could picture those big, sickly green, distorted beings creeping towards him, their wide-flung arms waving uncertainly like the tentacles of a huge octopus as they lurched forward; he could imagine the fixed, expressionless stare of those great goggle-eyed glasses
in the squat neckless helmets and, as the current caused light and shadow to waver and change, the figures seemed actually moving towards his hiding place.
It was terrible; he no longer thought of them as fellow men, no longer looked upon them as human beings; his fears had transformed them to submarine monsters, weird, uncanny, intelligent but bloodthirsty creatures, and so great was the tension, so fearful the vision conjured up by his overwrought imagination that he would have screamed had his mouth not been parched and dry and incapable of uttering a sound. It was like a nightmare, a dream in which one is powerless to move or to cry out; where one cannot compel muscles or mind to function; where one feels that it cannot be real, cannot be possible and yet is filled with sweating, blood-curdling terror that it is. And then, after what seemed hours of torture, but was barely ten seconds from the time the men had emerged from the sewer, their voices ceased and to Tom’s inexpressible relief they appeared to fade into the murky green water. They were moving away, soundlessly, mysteriously, without visible effort,