originally published Fantastic, June 1958
Howard Lane is a freelance writer and full-time drunk who's relocated to the Caribbean island of Santa Rita to live cheaply and escape/drown his sorrows over a failed romance. One night he encounters a rarity - an American couple; Don Hanson, an overbearing jerk, and his "secretary" Dena Drake, a classic 50's-type blonde bombshell/fallen woman. Howard thinks Don is an asshole but he's instantly smitten with Dena.
Don has a proposition. It seems he's acquired an 18th century pirate's ship's log which tells of a fabulous treasure lost of the coast of Santa Rita - it seems the pirates sank a galleon carrying, among other things, a gold ark taken from some remote temple and carried intact. Although the pirates attempted to retrieve the ark from the sunken ship, it seems all their efforts failed when men died and others became superstitiously afraid, and they were forced to abandon the wreck to its watery grave. After determining the log is legit, Howard signs up to help pave the way to Don and a small crew diving for the treasure.
Things go bad fast. The find the wrecked hull, but one of Don's divers, Roberto, floats up without his head. The crew starts muttering about curses and such, but Don puts it down to a freak accident.
Don begins teaching Howard how to dive. He takes the next dive himself and manages to explore the hull a bit more, but becomes alarmed by what he thinks are nitrogen narcosis caused hallucinations. He suggests Howard dive himself for it next.
During his dive, Howard sees the ghoulish figure of a female pirate zombie, brandishing a cutlass, then a black boiling cloud that seems to emanate tentacles and faces, including Roberto's. A panicked Howard heads for the surface, way too fast. Don is still not dissuaded by Howard's experience, and plans for them both to dive tomorrow.
That night Howard dreams of a strange entity living in the wreck that absorbs the consciousness of its prey. After the dream, his consciousness too begins to merge with the entity, which is, of course, entirely real.
They dive, find the ark, and Don is devoured by the creature in it. Howard tries to explain everything to Dena, but she isn't buying it. She tries to seduce Howard, but his interest in normal things is fading. The crew tries to take the boat and flee, but Howard and Dena witness as the boat is seized by the increasingly-powerful creature from the ark.
Howard, now completely in thrall to the thing from the ark, sacrifices Dena to it. He is captured by the local police and deemed hopelessly insane. As the police commish is writing up his report, he hears Howard chanting from his cell, and sees a black, boiling shape begin to rise from the coastal waters...
Wow! Now this was a re-read worth re-reading.
I recall first reading this one at about 16 or so, and being not-that impressed with it. In my memory it was just a kind of search-for-sunken-treasure sorta crime thriller with some tentacles showing up at one point, and I didn't even get its Mythosiness, which proves I was either a dumb kid or not paying close enough attention. I'm positive I read it a second time in college but again, my memory of it was as nothing special.
Well I was wrong, man. This is first-rate 50's Bloch, with cliched but strongly-drawn characters, and an air of sleaze and noir-ish psychodrama that was Bloch's stock-in-trade by this time. But as to the Lovecraftian elements - well, the nightmare creature stored in the ark in the wreck (it sounds a bit like a Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua, for all you CoC players) is depicted perfectly, especially its alien and malignany ability to absorb the minds and memories of its victims, and/or apparently invade the mind of those it even comes into contact with. This is one of the scariest and most convincing monsters in all Cthulhu-land, and its perefectly-presented arrival in the midst of what looks like a conventional heist tale makes this a real gem.
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