by Donald Tyson
“Of what?”
“I once heard a seaman tell of a ghost island that moved from place to place and wrecked ships.”
I laughed bitterly. “Seamen are old women when it comes to superstitions.”
“He said the island was harvesting souls, whatever that means.”
“Do we still have souls, after all the things we’ve done?” Martala asked.
“We still have souls,” I assured her. “They are not so white as they once were, but we still have them.”
I sounded so convincing, I almost believed it.
2.
The storm eased its fury toward morning. By the time the sun came up above the trees, the sky was blue and the breeze mild. There was nothing to show that the night had been ripped in two other than the fragments of wood and sail and rope on the beach.
I was surprised to find no corpses.
“The men of the ship may have been washed ashore further along the beach,” I said to Altrus, who limped beside me.
“If so, we’ll run into them sooner or later. There’s nowhere to go except into the trees.”
A kind of road ran from the beach through the forest toward the heart of the island. It did not look much traveled, but it indicated some sort of human habitation. We set off along it and left the beach behind.
“It’s strange there are no birds,” Martala said.
“I noticed that,” Altrus said. “Not a single bird chirped at dawn.”
Now that I thought of it, I noticed that no insects bit my flesh. This was strange indeed. A walk in the shadows beneath the trees usually brought clouds of hungry flies. I said nothing to the others.
“Look, a man,” Martala said, pointing ahead on the road.
He did not hear her, but continued with a slow pace around a curve in the road and was lost from view.
“I think it was one of the seamen from the ship.” she said.
We hastened our pace, and soon saw him again, nearer this time. I called out to him but he did not turn his head. His seaman’s clothes were salt-stained and his head lacked a hat. He walked with an oddly disjointed motion as though supported by strings.
“He must have hit his head when we wrecked,” Altrus said.
That was the obvious explanation, but I continued to feel uneasy. Something about the way he moved seemed wrong.
We reached the man and Altrus clapped a hand on his shoulder and turned him around.
A splinter of wood projected several inches from one of his eye sockets. The other eye stared at us dully. The man’s mouth lolled open, and his tongue was swollen and black. He stood without moving for several heartbeats, then slowly turned as though pulled around on an invisible rope and continued his lurching walk along the road.
“The splinter must have pierced his brain,” Martala said. “He’s lost his reason.”
“He’s lost more than that,” Altrus muttered.
“What do you mean?”
“When I laid my hand on him, he was cold. He felt like a dead fish.”
“There is nothing we can do for him,” I told the others. “Leave him and go on.”
We passed the seaman and continued ahead of him. Soon he was lost behind the trees as the road curved and the forest pressed in from both sides. There was still no birdsong.
“Look, there are others,” the girl said when we had walked another quarter of an hour.
Three men dressed in the rough clothing of common seamen lurched along the road ahead. They did not converse or turn when we called to them. We approached with caution but did not touch any of them, and they did not stop for us, or even seem to realize we were there.
“This one looks like he has a broken neck,” Altrus said of one man, studying the twist and tilt of his head with a practiced eye. He had broken enough necks himself to recognize one when he saw it.
“These other two look drowned,” Martala said in a small voice.
A shiver of dread ran along my spine. Even a necromancer is not immune to the weirdness of corpses that walk. Looking at their empty eyes and slack faces, I had no doubt that all three of them were as dead as the man we had already passed.
“Something must be drawing them along this road,” Altrus mused.
“You don’t suppose—” The girl abruptly stopped speaking.
“Suppose what?” the mercenary asked.
She looked at me, and I divined what was in her mind. Another chill ran along my spine, this one more personal than the last.
“Touch my skin,” I told her.
She took the hand I extended.
“What does it feel like?”
“Warm,” she said, relief evident in her voice.
Altrus looked from one to the other of us, then barked laughter. “I’ve been dead. This isn’t what it feels like.”
“It feels like nothing,” I said, remembering my experience.
“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I was in a wonderful golden palace surrounded by beautiful women. It was a hell of a lot more pleasant than this stinking island.”
We came upon the main body of the crew from the ship, eleven of them. Some showed evidence of a violent death, but the others had merely drowned. They walked almost touching, those behind pressing up against those in front, but they were not together. None acknowledged the others, and none spoke. They ignored our words. When I touched one of those at the back of the group, he stopped, then after a moment continued onward. Since they filled the road from side to side, we fell into step behind them, and eventually the three we had passed caught up with us. We let them go ahead of us, and did the same when the lone straggler with the splinter in his eye finally reached us.
“It looks like the entire crew. There’s the captain. The sea must have stripped off his fine coat and taken his hat.”
“Why are we alive and the rest dead?” Martala asked.
Neither of us responded. Was it mere chance, I wondered, or was there more than coincidence to it?
“For that matter, why are we following this road?” she went on. “I suspect we won’t like what we find at the end of it.”
“Where else is there to go?” I said.
“I’m curious,” Altrus said. “I want to meet whatever dwells on this island.” He fingered the hilt of his sword.
“You cannot slay the already-dead,” I reminded him.
“I can make the experiment. At the very least, I can dismember whatever wrecked us here.”
“Do you think our wreck was unnatural?”
“You said it yourself, Alhazred. No island exists in this part of the Red Sea.”
“Very well; we will seek the masters of this island, and demand an explanation for their rude behavior.”
Altrus laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll make a freebooter of you yet.”
“Sometimes I think you’re both mad,” the girl said, but she said it with a smile.
3.
We left the trees and came upon a circular lake of calm blue water. In the center of the lake was a walled citadel of considerable size. A causeway of bricks linked the gates of this citadel to the road. We followed the crew of our ill-fated ship onto the causeway.
Across the water there came the sounds of industrious activity from behind the walls—the fall of hammers on chisels, the chop of axes into wood, the rasp of saws, the clatter of cart wheels over cobblestones. Missing from this chorus of industry were the cries of human voices.
The massive gates stood open. The stench that came through them was the vileness of rotting meat. There were no guards on the entrance arch as we walked under it. Inside, we stopped and gazed around in wonder as the dead seamen continued down the street. The citadel was a beehive of activity. Men carried stones and timber, mixed mortar, built walls, roofed buildings with tiles, laid cobblestones, and fired bricks in kilns. It was all done without overseers, and with no word spoken between the workmen.
I studied those nearest us for some time to be certain before I spoke. “They are a
ll dead.”
Altrus gestured to a man climbing a ladder with a stack of red tiles on his shoulder. “What was your first clue?”
The man’s flesh had rotted away from his head, leaving little more than a skull wrapped in pieces of dried and blackened skin. He had no eyes in his empty sockets. He was missing one arm below the elbow, and from the ragged sleeve of his shirt a bare bone projected.
“What makes them move?” Martala wondered. “How do they know what work to do?”
“We saw something like this above the Cataracts in Egypt, remember?” I said to the girl.
“How could I forget? It was the thing that killed you.”
An animated corpse set against me by a shaman had taken my life. Only Martala’s determination and her skill at necromancy had brought me back from the land of the dead. If not for the girl, I would have been nothing but bones and dust.
“Don’t underestimate them,” I cautioned Altrus. “Whatever animates them may give them greater than human reserves of vitality.”
We continued along the main street, stepping out of the way of the walking corpses that crossed our path, pushing wagonloads of building materials. Of horses and donkeys there were none. There was not so much as a dog or a cat. However, there were children. They worked along with the others, silent and slack of face, their flesh in various stages of decomposition.
The smell was amazing. I am a ghoul, so it did not trouble me, but I could see my companions struggling to contain the contents of their stomachs. It was perhaps just as well that they had not eaten that day.
“Do you notice anything odd about the windows and doorways?” I murmured.
Martala squinted up at the unfinished buildings. “The doors are strangely tall and narrow. And the windows are too high to look through without standing on your toes.”
“What does that mean?” Altrus asked.
I shrugged like a ghoul. How was I to know?
In the center of the citadel we came upon an open courtyard, and in the center of this circular courtyard rested a black sphere that was some dozen cubits in diameter. We stopped and stared at it in wonder. Its surface was perfectly smooth, like polished glass, but it was the color of jet. It did not reflect our images, as I would have expected were it made of some wholesome substance.
“Are we going to touch it?” the girl asked.
“I’m not going to touch it,” I said.
“Altrus, you touch it.”
“Are you mad, girl? I’m not touching that thing.”
“We have a consensus,” I said.
There were no workers in the courtyard. I looked around at the walls, which rose some four or five levels to the roofs. They were unbroken by windows or doors. The only access to the courtyard was the archway through which we had entered.
“Why doesn’t it roll away?” Altrus asked.
I approached the sphere cautiously and peered beneath it. “It doesn’t quite touch the cobblestones.”
“You mean it’s floating?”
“That is the way it looks.”
“What keeps it up?”
I looked at him.
He shrugged. “You always seem to have an answer for everything.”
“Not for this.”
“We should get out of here, right now,” Martala said, eyeing the black sphere as though it were a viper about to strike.
“I think she’s right,” Altrus said. “We can steal some tools, cut some trees, build a raft.”
“I believe you are right,” I agreed. “I don’t like the feel of this place.”
“Fuck the feel of it; it’s the smell I want to get away from.”
“Find some axes and a saw. And rope if there is any. Let’s get out of here.”
We gathered our tools and made our way to the front gate. It was shut, and locked by some hidden mechanism.
“No point in attempting to cut through it,” Altrus said. “The planks are too thick, and they’re bound with iron.”
“We’ll find a way to go over the wall,” I said.
“We have no rope,” the girl reminded me. We had not been able to find any.
“Get to the top of the wall, and see if we can climb down the outside.”
The walking corpses that passed us on the stairs that led to the top of the wall ignored us as though we were invisible. We peered over the parapet. The wall was built with an overhang at the top and was sheer. A spider could have climbed down it, perhaps.
“There’s no way to climb that,” Altrus said with disgust. “We need rope, and lots of it.”
Throwing our axes and saw over the edge of the wall to the causeway below, we descended back into the citadel of the dead. By this time it was late afternoon, and the shadows were lengthening.
“There’s nothing for us to eat,” Martala moaned.
“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “There is ample meat for us to eat.”
The two stared at me. I had seen that stare before. It was the look they gave me when I said something so outrageous or repellent, it caused them to reassess my humanity.
“I have no intention of going hungry. You two may suit yourselves.”
I eyed the shuffling corpses as they passed, looking for one that was not too ripe.
“Food is the least of our concerns,” Altrus said.
“How so?” she asked.
“Look around. Do you see any water?”
He was right. The citadel contained no wells, no cisterns, no water of any kind. The walking dead needed no water.
“If we don’t get out of here, we’ll die of thirst in a matter of days.”
“Look for rope,” I said.
We split up and wandered in different directions, searching for something with which to lower ourselves from the top of the wall, but not a strand of rope was to be found anywhere. When we came together once again, it was growing dark as twilight drew on.
“We could strip the corpses and try tying their clothing together,” the girl suggested.
Altrus shook his head.“Look at those rags. They are falling off their backs, they are so rotten. They’d never support our weight.”
“Maybe the gate will open,” I said. “It opened for us; maybe it will open again.”
“It opened to admit the crew of the ship,” Altrus said. “Unless there’s another wreck, why would it open again?”
I could not fault his reasoning.
The deep toll of a bell rang through the citadel, rebounding from the stone walls and tile roofs. Four times it rang. On the final peal, all of the walking dead collapsed where they stood like dolls made of sticks and rags. One fell off a ladder and hit the stones of the road with a sickening crunch of broken bones, where it lay unmoving.
“Quickly, we must conceal ourselves,” I hissed.
4.
We hid in a deep doorway, concealed under shadow, without knowing why we hid. Some sense of danger had compelled me to act quickly. Now we crouched and listened to the silence. There is no silence so deep as a city of the dead. The purple of the sky turned to black, and the stars brightened. The moon in her first quarter cast down enough light to see. It seemed very important to me that we make absolutely no sound. I held a hand of each of my companions in mine and waited.
A faint rustle, like the brush of a dry leaf blown along a street by a breeze, reached the holes where my ears had been. I tightened my grip on my companions’ hands and held my breath.
Something tall and thin and very black slid along the street on long legs that folded beneath it as it moved. It was not even remotely human. It reminded me of that large insect that catches its prey in its forelegs and eats them, the one they call the praying mantis. Its head swiveled this way and that on its slender neck, and its enormous eyes seemed to look everywhere at once.
It stopped at one of the corpses and bent over it. By the moonlight I saw a long, narrow tube extend from what must has been its mouthparts. This worked its way into the mouth and down the throat of the corpse, so that
its stomach bulged from the movement of the tube inside it. The abdomen of the black creature pulsed, and something flowed down the tube into the corpse. Then the tube was withdrawn, and the creature moved on to the next corpse.
Raising my companions’ hands, I pointed with them down the street and drew their heads closer to mine. “There’s another one,” I whispered, so softly I was not sure they had heard.
It was actually two of the creatures that stalked the far end of the street on their rustling legs. As they came to the corpses, they bent and inserted their tubes into their mouths.
“Are they feeding them?” Martala asked.
“I think so. It’s the only way such wretched corpses could continue to work.”
“What are they?” Altrus said.
One of the creatures stopped and swiveled its head with a quick motion, its long feelers twitching this way and that.
“It heard you,” I breathed into Altrus’s ear. “Make no sound.”
It approached alertly, moving with deceptive speed on its long, folded legs. The feelers on its head seemed to test the air. I wondered if it could smell us. Our flesh was not rotting. That set our scent apart from the stench of the corpses.
It continued to draw nearer, questing this way and that, pausing to listen, until it was only a few steps away. There it stood, shivering and twitching while it smelled the air. As it started to slide toward the shadowed doorway where we crouched, Altrus released my hand and straightened his back. He stepped out into the moonlight.
“Looking for me, you ugly brute?”
The thing drew itself up on its hind legs until it towered above him, its forelegs twitching and making rapid grasping movements in the air. From some part of its body it began to emit a high-pitched scream, like the sound of a whistle.
Altrus drew his sword and severed its round head from its body in a single motion. The head rolled away, but the body continued to stand, and the scream continued. It was answered from different parts of the citadel by similar sustained shrieks.
I stepped out, drew my own sword, and cut off one of the creature’s hind legs. It fell to its side, kicking and flexing its long body. We began to hack at it, chopping off pieces until what was left stopped moving.