It was among the blacks before they knew what was happening. Yells of hate changed to screams of terror, and in an instant all was madness, a clustering tangle of struggling black bodies and limbs, and that great sinuous cable-like trunk writhing and whipping among them, the wedge-shaped head darting and battering. Torches were knocked against the walls, scattering sparks. One man, caught in the squirming coils, was crushed and killed almost instantly, and others were dashed to the floor or hurled with bone-splintering force against the walls by the battering-ram head, or the lashing, beam-like tail. Shot and slashed as it was, wounded mortally, the great snake clung to life with the horrible vitality of its kind, and in the blind fury of its death-throes it became an appalling engine of destruction.
Within a matter of moments the blacks who survived had broken away and were fleeing down the tunnel, screaming their fear. Half a dozen limp and broken bodies lay sprawled behind them, and the serpent, unlooping himself from these victims, swept down the tunnel after the living who fled from him. Fugitives and pursuer vanished into the darkness, from which frantic yells came back faintly.
“God!” Wentyard wiped his brow with a trembling hand. “That might have happened to us!”
“Those men who went groping down the corridor must have stumbled onto him lying in the dark,” muttered Vulmea. “I guess he got tired of running. Or maybe he knew he had his death-wound and turned back to kill somebody before he died. He’ll chase those blacks until either he’s killed them all, or died himself. They may turn on him and spear him to death when they get into the open. Pick up your part of the necklace. I’m going to try that door again.”
Three powerful drives of his shoulder were required before the ancient door finally gave way. Fresh, damp air poured through, though the interior was dark. But Vulmea entered without hesitation, and Wentyard followed him. After a few yards of groping in the dark, the narrow corridor turned sharply to the left, and they emerged into a somewhat wider passage, where a familiar, nauseating reek made Wentyard shudder.
“The snake used this tunnel,” said Vulmea. “This must be the corridor that branches off the tunnel on the other side of the idol-room. There must be a regular network of subterranean rooms and tunnels under these cliffs. I wonder what we’d find if we explored all of them.”
Wentyard fervently disavowed any curiosity in that direction, and an instant later jumped convulsively when Vulmea snapped suddenly: “Look there!”
“Where? How can a man look anywhere in this darkness?”
“Ahead of us, damn it! It’s light at the other end of this tunnel!”
“Your eyes are better than mine,” muttered Wentyard, but he followed the pirate with new eagerness, and soon he too could see the tiny disk of grey that seemed set in a solid black wall. After that it seemed to the Englishman that they walked for miles. It was not that far in reality, but the disk grew slowly in size and clarity, and Wentyard knew that they had come a long way from the idol-room when at last they thrust their heads through a round, vine-crossed opening and saw the stars reflected in the black water of a sullen river flowing beneath them.
“This is the way he came and went, all right,” grunted Vulmea.
The tunnel opened in the steep bank and there was a narrow strip of beach below it, probably existent only in dry seasons. They dropped down to it and looked about at the dense jungle walls which hung over the river.
“Where are we?” asked Wentyard helplessly, his sense of direction entirely muddled.
“Beyond the foot of the slopes,” answered Vulmea, “and that means we’re outside the cordon the Indians have strung around the cliffs. The coast lies in that direction; come on!”
The sun hung high above the western horizon when two men emerged from the jungle that fringed the beach, and saw the tiny bay stretching before them.
Vulmea stopped in the shadow of the trees.
“There’s your ship, lying at anchor where we left her. All you’ve got to do now is hail her for a boat to be sent ashore, and your part of the adventure is over.”
Wentyard looked at his companion. The Englishman was bruised, scratched by briars, his clothing hanging in tatters. He could hardly have been recognized as the trim captain of the Redoubtable. But the change was not limited to his appearance. It went deeper. He was a different man than the one who marched his prisoner ashore in quest of a mythical hoard of gems.
“What of you? I owe you a debt that I can never-”
“You owe me nothing,” Vulmea broke in. “I don’t trust you, Wentyard.”
The other winced. Vulmea did not know that it was the cruelest thing he could have said. He did not mean it as cruelty. He was simply speaking his mind, and it did not occur to him that it would hurt the Englishman.
“Do you think I could ever harm you now, after this?” exclaimed Wentyard. “Pirate or not, I could never-”
“You’re grateful and full of the milk of human kindness now,” answered Vulmea, and laughed hardly. “But you might change your mind after you got back on your decks. John Wentyard lost in the jungle is one man; Captain Wentyard aboard his king’s warship is another.”
“I swear-” began Wentyard desperately, and then stopped, realizing the futility of his protestations. He realized, with an almost physical pain, that a man can never escape the consequences of a wrong, even though the victim may forgive him. His punishment now was an inability to convince Vulmea of his sincerity, and it hurt him far more bitterly than the Irishman could ever realize. But he could not expect Vulmea to trust him, he realized miserably. In that moment he loathed himself for what he had been, and for the smug, self-sufficient arrogance which had caused him to ruthlessly trample on all who fell outside the charmed circle of his approval. At that moment there was nothing in the world he desired more than the firm handclasp of the man who had fought and wrought so tremendously for him; but he knew he did not deserve it.
“You can’t stay here!” he protested weakly.
“The Indians never come to this coast,” answered Vulmea. “I’m not afraid of the Cimarroons. Don’t worry about me.” He laughed again, at what he considered the jest of anyone worrying about his safety. “I’ve lived in the wilds before now. I’m not the only pirate in these seas. There’s a rendezvous you know nothing about. I can reach it easily. I’ll be back on the Main with a ship and a crew the next time you hear about me.”
And turning supply, he strode into the foliage and vanished, while Wentyard, dangling in his hand a jeweled strip of gold, stared helplessly after him.
THE GHOST PIRATES, by William Hope Hodgson
“Strange as the glimmer of the ghastly light
That shines from some vast crest of wave at night.”
DEDICATION
To Mary Whalley
“Olden memories that shine against death’s night—
Quiet stars of sweet enchantments,
That are seen In Life’s lost distances…”
—The World of Dreams
INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer
William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an Englishman who went to sea for several years as a young man and seems to have had a thoroughly unpleasant time of it, and later argued in print that the British Merchant Marine was not worth joining. He also became a body-builder, and, according to his biographer Sam Moskowitz, took a certain delight in beating up sailors who had mistreated him. Despite this, the sea gave Hodgson the formative experience of his life, and surely contributed to the sense of vastness, solitude, and cosmic strangeness found in his best work. More overtly, it provided him with much of his subject matter, many of his settings, and any number of tentacular monstrosities which bedevil his characters. Hodgson has no peer, or even a serious challenger, as an author of creepy sea stories. Perhaps is prose is not as graceful as that of Joseph Conrad, and he does not delve far into character, but when it comes to haunted derelicts and hideous, fungoid transformations, there is no one else like him.
Hodgson’s earlie
r work centers on four novels, which, subsequent research seems to indicate, were actually written in reverse of the order in which they were published. But as this is still uncertain, the dates given are those of publication.
The Boats of “The Glen Carrig” (1907) tells how survivors of a sunken ship encounter numerous monsters and undergo strange adventures in a seaweed-choked Sargasso Sea.
The House on the Borderland (1908) drew some of its inspiration from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), but is a terrific creation in its own right, a novel told in the form of a manuscript found in a crumbling ruin, tell how the hapless protagonist was besieged by a series of horrific monstrosities swarming out of a dimensional rift. Amid the novel’s potent sense of terror and inevitable doom, there is also a vision of the far future, of a remote, post-human Earth.
The Ghost Pirates (1909) is another haunted sea story, this time about a ship overwhelmed by pirates from another dimension.
The Night Land (1912) is Hodgson’s most controversial work because of the awkward, faux-archaic language in which it is written, rendering the book’s content impenetrable to many readers. While the style has been called one of the greatest blunders in all of literature, there is no denying that The Night Land, like The Time Machine which came before it and Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950) which is descended from it, is one of the truly great depictions of remote futurity, when the sun has gone out, and the remnants of mankind dwell in vast metal pyramids, surrounded by monsters of the darkness. Despite its numerous faults, which he acknowledged, H.P. Lovecraft found this to be “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written,” and went on to say of the hero’s quest across the demon-haunted land, “in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature.”
Among Hodgson’s shorter fiction, two of the most notable stories are “The Derelict,” about a decayed, fungus-enshrouded vessel adrift at sea for so long that it has evolved into a new kind of living entity, and “The Voice in the Night,” about sailors who have met a similarlyu hideous, fungoid fate. Besides sea-monsters and ghosts, Hodgson had a thing about fungus.
The stories collected in Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1913) deal with a professiona “occult detective” of the familiar Victorian sort, a descendent of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius and Bram Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, and a model for many who came after, such as Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin. Some of these stories display considerable, spooky power. Others may disappoint, because the “supernatural” elements turn out to be hoaxes, but this device is also the series’ strength. Psychic detective stories get boring fast when the reader knows that every odd manifestation is going to prove the result of a ghost or spirit, and disposed of by occult means. Hodgson deftly kept the reader guessing.
Late in his life Hodgson turned more to short stories for popular magazines, most of them not supernatural, whatever the market would bear. If he had lived longer he certainly would have become a pulp generalist like J. Allen Dunn or H. Bedford Jones, although he might have been drawn back to writing weird fantasy by the founding of Weird Tales in 1923. But as it happened, despite his being past prime military age, he volunteered for service in World War I, became an army officer, and was killed on a dangerous mission into No Man’s Land in 1918.
Some of his stories and poems were collected and published in the first few years after his death, but his work otherwise languished in deep obscurity for several years until gradually rediscovered by a few anthologists, then by H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. Not only does Lovecraft discuss Hodgson at length in his pivotal “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” but Clark Ashton Smith also published an essay about him. Hodgson undeniably influenced Smith. We can see the origins of Zothique in The Night Land. Since then, through the efforts of such scholars as H.C. Koenig in the 1930s and ’40s, and Sam Moskowitz in the ’70s and ’80s, Hodgson’s work has become better known. He was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, then in substantial editions by Arkham House, Donald M. Grant, and Night Shade Books, and put into paperback (first The House on the Borderland, then his other novels) in the ’60s and ’70s. Lin Carter featured him prominently in the seminal Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which established the canon of fantasy as a genre. Since then it has been clear that Hodgson is one of those writers, like Arthur Machen or David Lindsay, whose work is not always popular but, because of its utter uniqueness, refuses to die.
Author’s Preface
This book forms the last of three. The first published was The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’; the second, The House on the Borderland; this, the third, completes what, perhaps, may be termed a trilogy; for, though very different in scope, each of the three books deals with certain conceptions that have an elemental kinship. With this book, the author believes that he closes the door, so far as he is concerned, on a particular phase of constructive thought.
I
The Figure Out of the Sea
He began without any circumlocution.
* * * *
I joined the Mortzestus in ’Frisco. I heard before I signed on, that there were some funny yarns floating round about her; but I was pretty nearly on the beach, and too jolly anxious to get away, to worry about trifles. Besides, by all accounts, she was right enough so far as grub and treatment went. When I asked fellows to give it a name, they generally could not. All they could tell me, was that she was unlucky, and made thundering long passages, and had no more than a fair share of dirty weather. Also, that she had twice had the sticks blown out of her, and her cargo shifted. Besides all these, a heap of other things that might happen to any packet, and would not be comfortable to run into. Still, they were the ordinary things, and I was willing enough to risk them, to get home. All the same, if I had been given the chance, I should have shipped in some other vessel as a matter of preference.
When I took my bag down, I found that they had signed on the rest of the crowd. You see, the “home lot” cleared out when they got into ’Frisco, that is, all except one young fellow, a cockney, who had stuck by the ship in port. He told me afterwards, when I got to know him, that he intended to draw a pay-day out of her, whether any one else did, or not.
The first night I was in her, I found that it was common talk among the other fellows, that there was something queer about the ship. They spoke of her as if it were an accepted fact that she was haunted; yet they all treated the matter as a joke; all, that is, except the young cockney—Williams—who, instead of laughing at their jests on the subject, seemed to take the whole matter seriously.
This made me rather curious. I began to wonder whether there was, after all, some truth underlying the vague stories I had heard; and I took the first opportunity to ask him whether he had any reasons for believing that there was anything in the yarns about the ship.
At first he was inclined to be a bit offish; but, presently, he came round, and told me that he did not know of any particular incident which could be called unusual in the sense in which I meant. Yet that, at the same time, there were lots of little things which, if you put them together, made you think a bit. For instance, she always made such long passages and had so much dirty weather—nothing but that and calms and head winds. Then, other things happened; sails that he knew, himself, had been properly stowed, were always blowing adrift at night. And then he said a thing that surprised me.
“There’s too many bloomin’ shadders about this ’ere packet; they gets onter yer nerves like nothin’ as ever I seen before in me nat’ral.”
He blurted it all out in a heap, and I turned round and looked at him.
“Too many shadows!” I said. “What on earth do you mean?” But he refused to explain himself or tell me anything further—just shook his head, stupidly, when I questioned him. He seemed to have taken a sudden, sulky fit. I felt certain that he was acting dense, purposel
y. I believe the truth of the matter is that he was, in a way, ashamed of having let himself go like he had, in speaking out his thoughts about “shadders.” That type of man may think things at times; but he doesn’t often put them into words. Anyhow, I saw it was no use asking any further questions; so I let the matter drop there. Yet, for several days afterwards, I caught myself wondering, at times, what the fellow had meant by “shadders.”
We left ’Frisco next day, with a fine, fair wind, that seemed a bit like putting the stopper on the yarns I had heard about the ship’s ill luck. And yet —
* * * *
He hesitated a moment, and then went on again.
* * * *
For the first couple of weeks out, nothing unusual happened, and the wind still held fair. I began to feel that I had been rather lucky, after all, in the packet into which I had been shunted. Most of the other fellows gave her a good name, and there was a pretty general opinion growing among the crowd, that it was all a silly yarn about her being haunted. And then, just when I was settling down to things, something happened that opened my eyes no end.
It was in the eight to twelve watch, and I was sitting on the steps, on the starboard side, leading up to the fo’cas’le head. The night was fine and there was a splendid moon. Away aft, I heard the timekeeper strike four bells, and the look-out, an old fellow named Jaskett, answered him. As he let go the bell lanyard, he caught sight of me, where I sat quietly, smoking. He leant over the rail, and looked down at me.
“That you, Jessop?” he asked.
“I believe it is,” I replied.
“We’d ’ave our gran’mothers an’ all the rest of our petticoated relash’ns comin’ to sea, if ’twere always like this,” he remarked, reflectively—indicating, with a sweep of his pipe and hand, the calmness of the sea and sky.
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 331