Chapter 4: A Locked Door
Okay, admittedly it wasn't much of a waterfall, being less than five feet high. But it was enough to capsize the longboat and to throw Jack, Ragetti and Pintel into the water.
Jack came up sputtering. The waterfall roared in his ears and, when he looked around, he realized to his horror that he was totally blind! Everything was black! He wiped his eyes, hoping in vain that maybe something was draped over them, but his eyes were fine. He should be able to see, but couldn't. He wanted to scream but he was too scared.
Then he saw wisps of light, long, vertical, undulating wisps of light that dance eerily and faintly before him. He swam forward and, as he reached the wisps of light, he was forced down by the plummeting of the waterfall. Okay, that meant he was behind the waterfall. He kept swimming and came out into the moonlight. Not far off Ragetti and Pintel were wrestling with the longboat, trying to turn in right side up. The boat was carrying them away from Jack.
"Psst!" He tried to get their attention. "Ahoy!" But the two men couldn't hear him over the roar of the falls. "Hey! You two! Over here!" They kept wrestling with the boat. Jack picked up a rock from the bank and hurled it.
It hit Ragetti on the forehead. His one good eye rolled upwards, and he sank unconscious beneath the churning water.
Pintel pulled him up again. The furious, bald man looked around for their assailant, but then realized it had been Jack. The captain waived them over, and so Pintel grabbed Ragetti's collar and pulled him through the water over to the waterfall.
"We need to hide under here!" Jack shouted. "The Spanish will be here any minute, and if they catch us floundering about in the water, we'll be swinging in nooses by morning!"
"What?"
"Can you hear me?"
"What?"
Jack grabbed Pintel and forced him and Ragetti through the waterfall. Once they were in darkness, they swam over to a rocky bank, pulled themselves up onto it, and lay there gasping.
Ragetti came to. "Where am I?" he asked.
"What?"
"Hey mates!" called out Jack. "There's a door over here! A locked door underneath a waterfall! Why would anyone build such a thing? Obviously, to try and keep us out! Savvy? That means we have to break in!"
"What?"
"Have either of you got a skeleton key on you?"
"What?"
Jack gave up. He picked up a rock and hit the padlock with it. He hit it again. And again, and again, and again. No luck. The lock maybe rusty, but it was stronger than the rock. Jack tossed the rock away, backed up a bit, aimed his shoulder at the wooden door, and charged. The wood-rotted, termite-gnawed door shattered into dust, and Jack went hurdling into the darkness beyond.
Ragetti appeared in the doorway, silhouetted in the moonlight filtering through the waterfall. "Captain, are you all right?"
"What?"
The scrawny pirate reached inside his vest and brought out a candle, small and dirty to be sure, but still a candle. With his bony fingers, he wrung the water out the wick the best he could, then put the hammer of his pistol up next to it, and pulled the trigger. The wet powder wouldn't fire of course, but the flint hitting steel sparked, and the spark lit the candle. Ragetti held the candle out and found a torch just inside the door. He used the candle to light the torch.
It was a crypt. Dust-covered coffins lined both sides of the stone-walled room. Horizontal niches were carved into the walls, and ancient skeletons lay within them. Near the doorway was an unoccupied coffin. Pintel moved the lid to cover the opening left by the obliteration of the door. That helped to keep some out the roar of the waterfall out, and kept the light in.
"Nothing of value here," grumbled Jack looking around.
Pintel said, "What an awful place."
"Why would anyone go to such lengths to hide a place that holds nothing of value?"
Pintel suggested, "Why don't we break into the coffins? Maybe there's something hidden inside."
Jack's spine wriggled at that suggestion.
Ragetti piped up, "I have a better way." He popped his wooden eye out of its socket. "I had Tia Dalma put a blessing on me eye. Now it 'sees' the answer to mysteries I comes up against. Watch this." He held the eyeball between his thumb and middle finger, snapped his fingers, and set the eyeball spinning. It danced merrily on a coffin lid, then kicked off and went bouncing across the floor. "Where'd it go?"
Jack continued to look around. A locked room hidden beneath a waterfall. Why? The candlelight on the walls wiggled as Ragetti carried his candle as he crawled along the floor looking for his eye. But the shifting light revealed nothing to Jack.
From the back of the room, Ragetti called out, "Captain, you see this wall back here? It's really a door."