Red Sails

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Red Sails

  by Edward M. Erdelac

  Back Cover Copy

  Under the full moon, a pirate crew of werewolves and vampires gives chase on a cannibal isle.

  When their ship is mercilessly sunk by pirates, British marine Jan and Dominican priest Timóteo are brought before the captain of the Trivia. Under its strange red sails, they hear the terrible tale of Captain Vigoreaux, a vampire captain with a crew of werewolves.

  With the full moon rising, the men are put ashore on a remote cannibal island and turned loose—to be hunted for sport. But with the aid of Sampari, a native girl with a passionate desire to put an end to her tribe’s oppression, the three of them just might find a way.

  Highlight

  As Jan reached the bald, rocky top ringed by bushes like a monk’s tonsure, the highest point of the island, he could hear the tumble of the stones below him, and the heavy panting and barking of the wolfmen. He could not hear the little brook spilling from the stone, but he knew it was there, as were the last two powder kegs.

  The wind kicked up, and he saw the flashing cloud sailing in across the night sky. It was fit to burst and nearly overhead. He dropped to his knees and struggled to light the powder trail in the moonlight, fumbling with the flintlock mechanism taken from one of the muskets. The light shifted, the air cooled. In less than a minute raindrops as big as gun-stones were plopping down in the earth and on his bare back. He tried to shield the powder, but it was no use. Soon he was in a downpour and powder was saturated. He flung the mechanism down and bellowed his frustration, drawing the stone axe as three great, shaggy heads thrust through the surrounding brush.

  They leapt at him. If he was to die, he would make the best of it…

  Red Sails

  978-1-61650-133-4

  Copyright © 2010, Edward M. Erdelac

  Edited by Cynthia Brayden-Thomas

  Book design by Brain Hunter

  Cover Art by Renee Rocco

  First Lyrical Press, Inc. electronic publication: April, 2010

  Lyrical Press, Incorporated

  17 Ludlow Street

  Staten Island, New York 10312

  http://www.lyricalpress.com

  eBooks are not transferable. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE:

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Published in the United States of America by Lyrical Press, Incorporated

  Dedication

  For Jeff, Ryan, and Elliott, in the spirit of REH

  Chapter 1

  The two men clinging to the broken capstan flinched as another pistol shot snapped out and another sailor bobbed face first in the waves, arms unfolding sleepily like blossoms in the gloaming. The raucous, sunburned men leaning over the rail of the outlaw sloop let out an appreciative cheer.

  The sound was dull in Janek Puzan’s ears, muffled by the churning seawater and the thrumming of his own heart. Only his face, upturned to the blue ocean sky, broke the surface like a dozing crocodile. There was no hiding in open water, but he did his best to mimic the rest of the human debris. He wanted to live to see his father’s meager Virginia headright again. A year ago in Jamestown he had cursed it in a fit of young and idle impetuousness. It seemed like lost Elysium now.

  On the other side of their makeshift buoy, Timóteo, a Dominican from Cordova similarly submerged to his ears, made his frightened voice a ragged whisper.

  “Lord! Who are they, Jan?”

  The blackfriar had befriended him, an enemy prisoner in the brig of a ship bound for New Spain. The brig, La Doña Marisol, was now somewhere far below. The crushing sea had been let into her timber belly by merciless blasts of cannonade from the sixth rate brigantine rigged sloop, with her queer sails the color of a cardinal’s vestments. It was from the deck of the same sloop the pirate muskets now chose from among the treading sailors like a fat lady making a show of picking chocolates, when it was inevitable the whole box was fated to be pillaged in one sitting.

  “Pirates,” Jan said, “and as cruel as any I ever heard of. They aimed for the launches.”

  So there’d be no escape. It’s as if they wanted no part of plunder.

  In the brief moments before the destruction of La Doña, Jan had seen their colors hoist through the smoke, a stark white dog skull on a black field with a red dollop of blood. He hadn’t thought any pirates were left in these waters. Neither had the Spanish captain, else they would not have been so unprepared.

  The attack had been swift and without quarter. The pirate sloop, running Portuguese colors, had simply come up alongside and lit into them without any warning. The second eighteen-gun broadside had ripped away La Doña’s wheel and her navigator with it, and brought the mizzenmast crashing down. She had spun slowly in stunned surrender as her severed rudder chain clattered free, offering up her defenseless flanks to be ravaged by the swivel guns. Those of her crew and passengers not killed in the initial onslaught dove like rats into the sea.

  But even the waters held no solace.

  Another discharge cracked from the sloop’s deck, and the top of another hapless sailor’s head popped off, spraying great red gouts, drawing the gulls to dive and catch the scattered fragments of matter and bone. To show his appreciation of the birds’ deftness, one of the pirates raised his musket and blew a gull apart in a burst of bloody feathers. His comrades roared with laughter, drowning out the entreaties of the dwindling sailors.

  The Spanish hurled up their cries for mercy and clemència and pitié, but it seemed the only language the brigands knew were lead and black powder. Death was the sole answer they gave, between charging their pistols. One by one the Marisols released their driftwood and became driftwood themselves, until only Jan and Timóteo remained, hiding in a reddened sea of flotsam.

  Jan saw the first of the corpses jerked down below the surface followed quickly by another. He gripped the wood tighter and drew up his legs, though it would do no good against the cold shadows moving beneath the waves. He clenched his eyes shut involuntarily, and in the next minute forced them open. He would not let himself die trembling like a fawn before the wolves. The pirates did not make sport of the killer fish as they did of the gulls. It was as if they acknowledged kinship.

  Then a ball struck the wood very near Jan’s face, blasting off a scattering of fine splinters. They were sighted. They would surely die. Whether from above or below, death was here.

  Timóteo rose up spluttering from the water and wrenched at the cross hanging from the chain around his neck. He brandished it at the leering buccaneers.

  “Do you men not fear the Lord?” he called out in a surprisingly strong voice.

  “We fear but one lord,” answered one of them, in rough, colonial-accented English, “and that is our master, Captain Vigoreaux! Ask the Devil about him when you see him!”

  The man put musket to shoulder. Showing considerable skill, he blew the upraised cross out of Timóteo’s trembling fingers, sending fragments flying to the eight directions.

  “Yo
u blaspheme and do murder?” Timóteo shouted. “I rebuke you and your captain, if man he is!”

  “Strong words for a soft-bellied priest!” yelled the brigand, a broad shouldered, redheaded man with a chin of blazing orange beard. He stood out among the others like a flame in a benighted wood. “Would you like to come aboard, padre, and show us what puts such iron in your guts?”

  “Kill us or leave us to the sharks, but be done with it!” Jan yelled, unable to hold his tongue. He hated to die for anyone’s sport and he’d damned if he was to sit by and allow his last moments to be made light of by some bloody-minded cutthroat.

  The pirate laughed and folded his thick arms across his chest. “Here’s another boldly spoken piece of driftwood! And a countryman by the sound of him! Maybe I’ll content myself to blast your capstan away and watch you and your Spaniard boy sink to Davey Jones. Whatever I do, it’ll be because of my pleasure.” He slapped his broad breast. “Not because you demand it!”

  The ship’s bell tolled. Every man aboard snapped his head around at the sound. The crew looked to the redhead, who scowled and moved away from the rail, answering its summons, chewing his beard as he went.

  Jan watched and waited while Timóteo muttered prayers. There was a frothing of white water only a few yards away. It turned into a red spray as two blunt grey noses broke the surface. Jan saw black button eyes and distended pinkish gums for a moment, then a pair of sharp fins cut through the waters toward another cluster of corpses. Although the sharks sported the sharp-toothed jaws of ravenous monsters, no sound came from them but the snapping of bones. They emerged from deep nothing and returned there, only clouds of blood in the water to mark their passing.

  The redhead returned to the side, propping his blue, tattooed elbows on the rail. He kept his voice amused, but he didn’t look altogether pleased.

  “Your brave talk’s reached our captain’s ears, and he wants to match your faces with your sauce,” he called down. “But if you knew Captain Vigoreaux you’d not think this much of a respite.”

  They cast a line out and called for Jan and Timóteo to take hold. Since disobeying would mean death in the fishes’ maws anyway, they did as they were told.

  As they were drawn toward it, Jan saw the sloop’s figurehead; she was a bold eyed woman of imperious features, her long black hair swept back as though she faced a strong wind. Her painted, alabaster breasts appeared to heave against an immodest, wispy toga of black and orange.

  Along her bow the letters of her name and port of origin painted in a flourished, sea-chapped script gave some explanation as to her strange, scarlet sails:

  The Trivia—Hell.

  As Jan and Timóteo were hoisted from the water, something cold and thick as a tree trunk brushed against their legs and was gone.

  * * * *

  They were surprised to find they were not the only survivors brought on board. A few of Timóteo’s brother Dominicans sprawled on their hands and knees under the weight of their dripping black mantles and blubbered fearful prayers on The Trivia’s deck. Jan saw too the boatswain’s mate, who had freed him from his cell and given him a pistol and a sword when they expected boarders. The man was badly beaten. He lay in a heap against a coil of rope, moaning and spitting teeth.

  The priests were especially ill-treated by the Trivias, as if they were a greatly offending enemy the crew held in some special, mortal contempt. They were kicked and drubbed with belaying pins or musket butts. Some of the pirates lit cannon fuses and pressed them between their splayed fingers, or scourged the priests with leather flails. These last screamed and pleaded for clemency alternately from God and their tormentors. There was no obvious method or reason to it, only unbridled sadism that flecked the deck planks with blood.

  “En El Nombre de Dios!” Timóteo said, his voice cracking at the sight of his brothers so mistreated. “Why do this? Leave them alone!”

  He tried to push toward the offenders, but the big, redheaded man encircled his thin upper-arm with one fist and threw him back against Jan.

  “You’ll be seeing the captain too, padre,” the man growled.

  He was a full head taller than Jan, broad as a bull and densely freckled over every inch of flushed skin. His was a low, scowling forehead with hard, deep-set green eyes. His bulging arms were tattooed with three half-moons apiece.

  “And now, Driftwood,” he said, addressing Jan, who made no move except to help Timóteo to his feet. “If you please, down to the captain’s quarters.”

  “I know the way,” Jan said. He pulled Timóteo along with him.

  “Is it a sailor you are, then?” the redhead queried, stalking behind them and scowling at Timóteo every time he looked back over his shoulder after his suffering brothers.

  “No,” Jan answered. “Just a tobacco farmer.”

  “A long way from your leaf fields, ain’t you?”

  Jan said nothing, though inwardly he agreed.

  The other pirates were almost entirely Indians, he noted. Not Lascars or South Sea natives, but red Indians like they had back home, with feathered Mohawks and crude jewelry crafted of tooth, claw, and bone.

  Like her heathen children, the ship sported similar ornamentation. Her mainmast was savagely adorned with yellowed human skulls rising almost to the top, like a totem on a cannibal ship. Her yardarms tinkled in the sea breeze, strung with garlands of finger bones. The timber holes on the capstan were overlaid with four open-mouthed skulls, so when the handspikes were inserted through their grinning jaws, they turned, macabre faces on a hellish carousel.

  It was a queer marriage of the modern and the prehistoric. She was a craft out of time, as if her savage crew had waylaid some luckless voyagers from the present and reasoned how to navigate the ship back into modern waters.

  They were led to the captain’s quarters. The redhead drew the cutlass at his side and tapped the door with its edge. A low voice said “enter” and they did.

  At first Jan saw only a semicircle of heavy black drapery strung as a partition before the door. The redhead closed the door behind them and drew back the curtain. The casements were draped in thick, blood-colored curtains, casting the cabin in red shadow. A table was set with pewter-ware and grey goblets, but the only bit of meat on it was the fat old Dominican abbot, Padre Ramón.

  He would never see the missions of Mexico, as he was presently breathing his last. His pudgy fingers clawed at a swept-hilt rapier which was thrust through the center of his chest and pinning him to the table top. Blood bubbled from his grimacing lips. He turned his head to stare shakily at them as they entered.

  Timóteo gasped the abbot’s name, and would have rushed to him if Jan hadn’t grabbed the collar of his mantle and drawn him back.

  “He’s dying!” Timóteo stammered to Jan.

  “He’s dead,” Jan replied simply, and gestured to the corner of the cabin, where a stooped figure stood in shadow, removing a crystal decanter from a cupboard on the wall.

  Captain Vigoreaux moved into the near light. They were granted the impression of a haggard, immeasurably old man, the flesh of his face melting from his skull. His forehead was as lined as a dry lakebed. What hair he had was dirty white, and retreated from the top of his skull like choking grass from salted earth. His expression was one of weary contempt for everything he saw. He gazed out at them through glassy, half-lidded eyes shot through with reddish lightning.

  He wore a loose, dingy grey shirt, the lace like old cobwebs, and over that, like a dressing gown, a faded red cardinal’s cassock.

  “Gentlemen,” came a deep, tired, French-accented voice from the shriveled lips of the old man. “I am Capitan Absolon Vigoreaux.”

  “Monster!” Timóteo spat, eyes bulging in his outrage. “Have you no knowledge whatever of God?”

  “I’ve accumulated much knowledge in my long years upon this Earth, Father,” answered Vigoreaux tiredly as he made his way to the largest chair at the table with the empty decanter in his spotted hands, “but of God I have seen
nothing.”

  He settled into his chair, and propped his elbow on the arm. Then he laid the side of his head on his bony fist and closed his eyes. For a moment they thought he’d fallen asleep. The only sound in the cabin was the rasp of the man dying on the table.

  Jan’s eyes moved around the dim cabin, passing over a corner bunk, charts and a sextant on a bolted writing desk, sabers and pistols crossed on a wall. He was aware of Timóteo trembling at his side, and of the steady breathing of the huge redhead behind him. He wondered if he could reach one of the sabers in time to put it to use.

  “What do you—” Timóteo began.

  Vigoreaux held up one long, knobbed finger. He arched his bushy eyebrows and said, “A moment longer if you please, Father.” He inclined his head, like a man appreciating an especially fine concerto.

  They waited, and when Padre Ramón gave a great shudder and gasped his very last, Vigoreaux opened his bloodshot eyes and regarded them again.

  “There, you see? Do you know I am something of a student of expiration? I have sat and listened to the climactic breaths of so, so many, and they are like sunrises—or perhaps, it would be more appropriate to say, sunsets. No two are completely alike.” He stood slowly, and moved to stand over the dead man, looking down at him as he spoke. “You had a question, Father?”

  Timóteo could summon no words.

  Vigoreaux set the decanter on the table and drew out the rapier from the abbot’s chest. He tipped back the corpse’s chin with one hand. With the other, he placed the tip against Padre Ramón’s meaty throat. He pricked it swiftly and expertly in and out. Blood began to well up immediately from the puncture. Vigoreaux let the rapier clatter to the table, then tipped the body toward him, holding the decanter out of sight, in the posture of one milking a dairy cow.

  Behind them, the redhead snickered at Timóteo’s horrified expression.

  The priest began to pray rapidly.

  “Ah!” Vigoreaux winced. “Mon Dieu, none of that Latin hog-speak, if you please.”