The Back Wheel Read online

  PIRATE SHIP

  The hook had hidden a roughly circular pool, about two hundred feet across. There was only a couple of feet of water in it. There was something black sticking out from the dune … it was the stem of a ship . .. black … its splintered rudder resting at the edge of the shallow pool.

  It was upright, and it was stark and bare, washed clean of the sand to the stump of its after mast. I could see the wheel and binnacle … a black wheel … so black that it seemed to draw the darkness of the deck on which it stood into itself… to stand apart… to command.

  There was something vaguely sinister about that black deck thrusting from the dune. Something vaguely desperate in the clutch of the dune upon it—as though the dune held fast to something that never ought to have been bared; as though the dune was trying to draw back into itself that which had been bared.

  Other Avon Books by

  A. Merritt

  Face in the Abyss

  Moon Pool

  Ship of Ishtar

  With an Introduction by John U. Sturdevant

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Introduction Copyright © 1981 by James U. Sturdevant

  Chapters I through VII Copyright 1948 by Eleanor Merritt Chapters VIII through XXVII Copyright 1948 by Hannes Bok.

  Published by arrangement with Brandt & Brandt Literary

  Agents, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 81-65438

  ISBN: 0-380-55822-x

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to

  reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form

  whatsoever except as provided by the U. S. Copyright Law.

  For information address Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.,

  1501 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  First Avon Printing, August, 1981

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN

  OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA,

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U. S. A.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents:-

  Introduction - The Two Lives of A. Merritt

  CHAPTER I - The Susan Ann

  CHAPTER II - Deborah Looks Them Over

  CHAPTER III - The Hurricane

  CHAPTER IV - Benson’s Haven

  CHAPTER V - The Nameless Wreck

  CHAPTER VI - The Black Wheel Spins

  CHAPTER VII - In the Spiked Cabin

  CHAPTER VIII - In The Spiked Cabin (Continued)

  CHAPTER IX - In The Spiked Cabin (Continued)

  CHAPTER X - Clouds

  CHAPTER XI - Red Rafferty

  CHAPTER XII - Seeds for Dream Gardens

  CHAPTER XIII - The Black Priestess

  CHAPTER XIV - The Rafferty Story

  CHAPTER XV - Ezzulie and Rosalie

  CHAPTER XVI - The Case for Ghosts

  CHAPTER XVII - Irsuley and Ursula

  CHAPTER XVIII - Lore of the Wheel

  CHAPTER XIX - The Ivory Eidolon

  CHAPTER XX - A Curious Lady Fitz

  CHAPTER XXI - The Ship of Souls

  CHAPTER XXII - Rafferty Takes the Helm

  CHAPTER XXIII - Flora

  CHAPTER XXIV - The White Folk

  CHAPTER XXV - On Rafferty’s Beach

  CHAPTER XXVI - Death of the Susan Ann

  CHAPTER XXVII - Black Paradise

  The Two Lives of A. Merritt

  The year was 1935. I was fresh out of college and hopelessly dreaming of a future in writing. I had been turned down by half a dozen New York newspapers. They weren’t hiring. In those depression years they were busy firing, and wouldn’t go so far as to allow an applicant to fill out a job form.

  At the end of one exhausting day I found myself at the Dally Mirror building on East Forty-fifth Street being directed, or rather misdirected, by the elevator operator to a certain floor.

  I found myself, not at the Mirror personnel offices, but In the reception area of The American Weekly, a national Sunday supplement which called itself, “The Nation’s Reading Habit,” and boasted of ten million readers a week.

  An interviewer told me that the magazine hired only journalists with feature-writing experience, that the staff was small and the openings few. Sensing my frustration he was kind enough to let me fill out a job form. The following day he phoned my home. “On your form you wrote you were fluent in French. Can you read Middle French?” I replied that I could and we made an appointment for the following day. However, it wasn’t he or The American Weekly that required my fifteenth-century French but Someone named A. Merritt.

  This gentleman, it turned out, was second in command sit the Weekly to the legendary Morrill Goddard, the founder, as we know it today, of Sunday journalism. Merritt was short, rotund, genial, with twinkling blue eyes, sparse yellow hair and an ever-present pipe. It seems that he was planning to write a book about Joan of Arc and needed someone who could read the original trial records in Middle French. I was hired at thirty-five dollars a week for six weeks. The story of how I stumbled on a rich mine of untapped material will have to wait for another telling. Merritt was immensely pleased with the result and offered me a temporary job on the Weekly, reading foreign newspapers and clipping and translating French, Spanish, and German articles. My “temporary” job lasted thirty-one years and eventually I became managing editor of the Weekly and editor-in-chief of its successor publication, Pictorial Living.

  Meanwhile, from 1912 when he joined the Weekly until his death in 1943, Merritt had been leading two lives, developing his fantastic plots on the one hand while on the other, editing a national weekly magazine. Following Goddard’s death in 1937, Merritt became editor-in-chief of the Weekly, and four novels, already begun but unfinished, had to be put aside. He had little choice, for while his books gave him a fair return, his salary at the Weekly made him one of the highest paid editors in the country.

  Soon I got to know him personally, visiting often his home in Hollis, Long Island, where he and his wife lovingly tended a garden of poison plants. He had everything, importing many rare species from abroad, all the banes, aconite, belladonna, along with hives of bees to cross-pollinate. Anyone who got stung was in for real trouble.

  He had torn out the room divisions on the top story of his three-story house and kept there a huge collection of books on the supernatural. He was an accomplished pianist, setting his poems to music, and also spent many hours at a professional gem-polishing machine creating color from raw stones.

  From time to time I was his companion at frantic lunch hour sorties when he bought Tibetan tankahs, Chinese bronzes or African carvings.

  After I bought for him an oil painting of the Virgin of Guadeloupe by a primitive and very early Mexican artist, he asked me to teach him Spanish. I was puzzled why such a busy man would want to go through so many tedious hours of grammar.

  He told me that as a young man he had practiced law in Philadelphia. Some of his clients would later turn up as characters in his books. Tiring of the law, he found a job as a reporter on the Philadelphia Inquirer where, on assignment, he became an unwilling witness to a crime. He would never reveal the details, but the paper thought it expedient to hustle him out of the country to keep him from testifying. He attached himself to various archaeological expeditions at Cozumel in Mexico, Costa Rica and elsewhere in Central America, where he first became attracted to legends, rites, and mysterious gods. He had picked up’ some jungle Spanish and wanted to learn more. He was a fast learner and soon was challenging me with extinct verbs, obscure phrases and violent curses. He became so engrossed that he bought a villa on the shores of Lake San
Pablo in the Ecuadorian Andes, determined to spend his retirement there. His life was cut short before the dream could be fulfilled. He died of a heart attack in August* 1943.

  I need hardly comment on how his literary reputation has fixed itself permanently in the fantasy fiction field. First editions of his novels both in hardcover and in pulp bring incredible prices from eager collectors. As I write this two seminars have just been concluded on the university level for teachers of science fiction writing. The lectures concentrated on Tolkien, Merritt and Asimov. All of Merritt’s books are in print and estimates, here and abroad, total up to sales of about ten million copies.

  The Black Wheel which you are about to read was nearly finished at the time of his death and was completed with great success by Hannes Bok.

  I envy the reader who is discovering Merritt for the first time.

  John U. Sturdevant

  CHAPTER I

  The Susan Ann

  It seems to me that the time has come to tell what really did happen to Big Jim Benson’s show clipper, the Susan Ann. And this, obviously, includes what really did happen to those on the Susan Ann—Big Jim and his daughter Penelope, his junior partners Michael McTeague and Thad-deus Chadwick, Lady Fitz-Manton and her Russian lover Alexis Boriloff, the Rev. Dr. Swastlow and his unfortunately beautiful sister Flora; also Captain Johnson and the Susan Ann’s crew.

  Of course, there was the story I told when the sponge divers from Florida picked up Deborah and me in the cove of Little Palm Key. Perhaps some will remember it, although it happened all of five years ago. That the Susan Ann had been caught in a Caribbean hurricane, almost wrecked at the first stroke of it, all boats smashed, radio rig destroyed, radio operator killed; that wallowing soggily out of the hurricane she had found a haven in an uninhabited island off the Bahama Banks where she had been repaired as best we could; that stiff leaking and still unseaworthy she had at last set sail for Nassau only to be caught in another storm and founder with all on board except Deborah and myself. Surely some must remember. It was a good story, a reasonable story, a water-tight story that went down unquestioned. There was only one thing wrong with it—

  It wasn’t true.

  Deborah had been Lady Fitz-Manton’s personal maid. She was Scotch, a Calvinist, and her respectability so manifest that Her Ladyship once told me that she had found ten minutes’ concentration upon it as good as a dose of physic. This was said in Deborah’s presence and was one of her mistress’s little ways of putting her in her place. It must be admitted, however, that such perfection in respectability as Deborah’s was at times irritating to me.

  Deborah abhorred lying. But I made it plain to her that her inevitable and only reward for telling the truth would be the lingering, singularly unpleasant martyrdom of an insane asylum; no dramatic escape to a painless Paradise on the wings of approving angels.

  Then there was the double handful of jewels sewn around her waist What would she do with these in an insane asylum? They would take them away from her at once, undoubtedly. That settled it. Scotch thrift backed her Calvinist conscience to the operating table and removed the scruple.

  So the skipper of the sponge boat accepted us for what I said we were—the sole survivors of the Susan Ann. Backed by that extraordinary respectability of Deborah, he did not question my story, nor did the officials and reporters at Key West and New York when we reached there.

  How could I, then, have told the truth? Told of the nameless wreck and the black wheel? Or of the hell-vomit on Red Rafferty’s lost beach to which those bound to the black wheel steered us?

  It would have meant for me that same madhouse with which I had threatened Deborah!

  But now … well, there is none, I think, who can be injured by the truth. I have changed my name and practice another profession. I think also that men’s minds have broadened of late, giving to the unseen more recognition. And certainly Science has narrowed that borderland between the possible and what it called the impossible not so long ago.

  My name, at the time, was Ross Fenimore. I was in my early thirties, a doctor. My special interest was endocrinology, a study of the ductless glands. Having a small income, it had never been necessary for me to hang my shingle; go into private practice. I had no incumbrances; had given no hostages to fortune in the shape of either wife or children.

  I had established a connection with a certain New York hospital; a sort of roving interneship. It gave me the opportunities for research and studies that I desired, and laboratory facilities which otherwise I could not afford. I was a kind of medical handy-man, filling in here and there when necessity arose; assisting in operations and so on. I lived at the hospital, and had done so for the last three years.

  This day, I had been assisting Kurtson in a cancer case, mammillary, a difficult one. Kurtson stepped back and slipped off his mask and gloves. The orderlies slid the patient from the operating table and wheeled her away. Kurtson is a very great surgeon, and one of the few who finishes his own job to the last stitch. I had watched his long, strong fingers working with all the artistry of a master sculptor on tissue and nerve, vein and artery; swiftly extirpating, ligaturing, remoulding, pruning, cutting out the last malignant root of the carcinoma. It was as though his hands were alive with a life all their own.

  Kurtson liked me; had confidence in me. I had known that, because he called me in to help at his most difficult operations. I was very proud of that confidence.

  The nurses were cleaning up. I was checking the instruments. He said formally, and with, I thought, a touch of brusqueness:

  “When you have finished, come to my room.”

  I said: “Certainly, Dr. Kurtson.”

  Anxiously I tried to recall every move I had made. Where had I slipped? Kurtson wasn’t like Coster, his only surgical equal in New York. Carrying on a major operation, Coster was as tense as a tomcat that sights a rival. It didn’t affect his technique, but Heaven help assistant or nurse who made the slightest error. He lashed out at them with a picturesque and poisonous profanity that was a treat for others to hear, but a whip of wasps to the culprit. Kurtson’s habit was to pass over a lapse at the time—unless, of course, it was serious—and administer correction in private. His impersonality in this, his inhuman detachment, were worse than Coster’s variegated curses. I was no young interne or nurse forced to submit to a dressing down, but I took an immense pride in Kurtson’s good opinion. It was, therefore, with acute apprehension that I entered his room.

  He looked me over for a minute, then asked: “How long has it been since you had a vacation?”

  “Three years.”

  He said: “Your hand trembled twice when you were putting on the clamps. You hesitated over the needles, and you fumbled when you handed me the silver probe.”

  There was no use arguing. I nodded and said: “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing happened,” he said. “But something might have. And next time something may. There must be perfect coordination between surgeon and assistant. The odds against us are great enough at best. When does your arrangement with the hospital end?”

  I grew cold at that. Was he going to suggest that I resign?

  “In three months,” I answered. “The first of the year.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “Renew the arrangement, if the hospital’s agreeable. I’m happy here.”

  He shook his head. “It’s time you were out on your own, if you’re ever going to be. Even if it’s only for a while, it gives you an experience you’ll never get where you are. That aside, you need a rest. James Benson—you know of him—is a patient of mine. He has started out with his daughter, a couple of junior partners and some friends on that fancy clipper of his. Going to loaf around the Caribbean for a couple of months. The ship doctor he was going to take along disappointed him at the last moment. He has asked me to recommend another. Shall I recommend you? It pays, of course. And you would be treated as a guest.”

  I hesitated; after all, this wa
s a major upset in my ordered life.

  He said: “As a physician, I prescribe it. As a friend, I urge it. I can get you two months leave of absence from the hospital. You can come back and finish the last month of your arrangement. And renew it—if you still want to. I’m hoping you won’t.”

  I asked: “Any other reason for wanting me to go?”

  Now it was he who hesitated, then said: “Yes, there is. Professionally, I am much interested in Benson. Personally, I greatly like him. I don’t want him to have any third class, or even second class man with him if anything should happen. Not that I expect anything to happen. Physically, Benson is sound as a nut. Mentally—”

  He took a turn about the room, frowning. He faced me: “Benson is an autocrat. That’s how he built up his fame and fortune. Since he has practically retired, this habit of mind has grown stronger. His viewpoint is feudal. He doesn’t have servants—they are retainers. This same point of view he applies equally to his associates, friends or guests. Upon a ship, a ship which he commands, there are peculiar opportunities for the expansion of this mental quality. And there are peculiar reasons why upon the Susan Ann it might so expand. Even to the point of explosion. If it does—I’d like you to be there.”

  Well, from Kurtson that was something indeed, and nothing now except his own command could have stopped me from going on the Susan Ann. I said: “When do I go?”

  He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Good lad! Honestly, all I think you’ll have to worry about is the usual run of crew ailments. Some seasickness, of course. If Lady Fitz-Manton takes a fancy to you, she’ll probably develop symptoms. But she has that exalted gigolo Boriloff with her, so she probably won’t.”

  He laughed, and with such warm relief that I felt the glow his trust in me had brought grow warmer still.