They were somewhere in the Bay of Bengal. A week ago they had been on board the Cardigan, a tiny tramp freighter carrying its handful of passengers from Maulmain to Georgetown. The Cardigan had foundered in the typhoon off the Mergui Archipelago. For twelve hours she had heaved and groaned through an inferno of swirling seas. Then she had gone under.
Yancy’s memory of the succeeding events was a twisted, unreal parade of horrors. At first there had been five men in the little boat. Four days of terrific heat, no water, no food, had driven the little Persian priest mad; and he had jumped overboard. The other two had drunk salt water and died in agony. Now he and Miggs were alone.
The sun was incandescent in a white hot sky. The sea was calm, greasy, unbroken except for the slow, patient black fins that had been following the boat for days. But something else, during the night, had joined the sharks in their hellish pursuit. Sea snakes, hydrophiinae, wriggling out of nowhere, had come to haunt the dory, gliding in circles round and round, venomous, vivid, vindictive. And overhead were gulls wheeling, swooping in erratic arcs, cackling fiendishly and watching the two men with relentless eyes.
Yancy glanced up at them. Gulls and snakes could mean only one thing – land! He supposed they had come from the Andamans, the prison isles of India. It didn’t much matter. They were here. Hideous, menacing harbingers of hope!
His shirt, filthy and ragged, hung open to the belt, revealing a lean chest tattooed with grotesque figures. A long time ago – too long to remember – he had gone on a drunken binge in Goa. Jap rum had done it. In company with two others of the Cardigan’s crew he had shambled into a tattooing establishment and ordered the Jap, in a bloated voice, to “paint anything you damned well like, professor. Anything at all!” And the Jap, being of a religious mind and sentimental, had decorated Yancy’s chest with a most beautiful Crucifix, large, ornate, and colorful.
It brought a grim smile to Yancy’s lips as he peered down at it. But presently his attention was centered on something else – something unnatural, bewildering, on the horizon. The thing was a narrow bank of fog lying low on the water, as if a distorted cloud had sunk out of the sky and was floating heavily, half submerged in the sea. And the small boat was drifting toward it.
In a little while the fog bank hung dense on all sides. Yancy groped to his feet, gazing about him. John Miggs muttered something beneath his breath and crossed himself.
The thing was shapeless, grayish-white, clammy. It reeked – not with the dank smell of sea fog, but with the sickly, pungent stench of a buried jungle or a subterranean mushroom cellar. The sun seemed unable to penetrate it. Yancy could see the red ball above him, a feeble, smothered eye of crimson fire, blotted by swirling vapor.
“The gulls,” mumbled Miggs. “They’re gone.”
“I know it. The sharks, too – and the snakes. We’re all alone, Miggs.”
An eternity passed, while the dory drifted deeper and deeper into the cone. And then there was something else – something that came like a moaning voice out of the fog. The muted, irregular, sing-song clangor of a ship’s bell!
“Listen!” Miggs cackled. “You hear—”
But Yancy’s trembling arm had come up abruptly, pointing ahead.
“By God, Miggs! Look!”
Miggs scrambled up, rocking the boat beneath him. His bony fingers gripped Yancy’s arm. They stood there, the two of them, staring at the massive black shape that loomed up, like an ethereal phantom of another world, a hundred feet before them.
“We’re saved,” Miggs said incoherently. “Thank God, Nels—”
Yancy called out shrilly. His voice rang through the fog with a hoarse jangle, like the scream of a caged tiger. It choked into silence. And there was no answer, no responsive outcry – nothing so much as a whisper.
The dory drifted closer. No sound came from the lips of the two men as they drew alongside. There was nothing – nothing but the intermittent tolling of that mysterious, muted bell.
Then they realized the truth – a truth that brought a moan from Miggs’ lips. The thing was a derelict, frowning out of the water, inanimate, sullen, buried in its winding-sheet of unearthly fog. Its stern was high, exposing a propeller red with rust and matted with clinging weeds. Across the bow, nearly obliterated by age, appeared the words: Golconda – Cardiff.
“Yancy, it ain’t no real ship! It ain’t of this world—”
Yancy stooped with a snarl, and picked up the oar in the bottom of the dory. A rope dangled within reach, hanging like a black serpent over the scarred hull. With clumsy strokes he drove the small boat beneath it; then, reaching up, he seized the line and made the boat fast.
“You’re – goin’ aboard?” Miggs said fearfully.
Yancy hesitated, staring up with bleary eyes. He was afraid, without knowing why. The Golconda frightened him. The mist clung to her tenaciously. She rolled heavily, ponderously in the long swell; and the bell was still tolling softly somewhere within the lost vessel.
“Well, why not?” Yancy growled. “There may be food aboard. What’s there to be afraid of?”
Miggs was silent. Grasping the ropes, Yancy clambered up them. His body swung like a gibbet-corpse against the side. Clutching the rail, he heaved himself over; then stood there, peering into the layers of thick fog, as Miggs climbed up and dropped down beside him.
“I – don’t like it,” Miggs whispered. “It ain’t—”
Yancy groped forward. The deck planks creaked dismally under him. With Miggs clinging close, he led the way into the waist, then into the bow. The cold fog seemed to have accumulated here in a sluggish mass, as if some magnetic force had drawn it. Through it, with arms outheld in front of him, Yancy moved with shuffling steps, a blind man in a strange world.
Suddenly he stopped – stopped so abruptly that Miggs lurched headlong into him. Yancy’s body stiffened. His eyes were wide, glaring at the deck before him. A hollow, unintelligible sound parted his lips.
Miggs cringed back with a livid screech, clawing at his shoulder.
“What – what is it?” he said thickly.
At their feet were bones. Skeletons – lying there in the swirl of vapor. Yancy shuddered as he examined them. Dead things they were, dead and harmless, yet they were given new life by the motion of the mist. They seemed to crawl, to wriggle, to slither toward him and away from him.
He recognized some of them as portions of human frames. Others were weird, unshapely things. A tiger skull grinned up at him with jaws that seemed to widen hungrily. The vertebrae of a huge python lay in disjointed coils on the planks, twisted as if in agony. He discerned the skeletonic remains of tigers, tapirs, and jungle beasts of unknown identity. And human heads, many of them, scattered about like an assembly of mocking, dead-alive faces, leering at him, watching him with hellish anticipation. The place was a morgue – a charnel house!
Yancy fell back, stumbling. His terror had returned with triple intensity. He felt cold perspiration forming on his forehead, on his chest, trickling down the tattooed Crucifix.
Frantically he swung about in his tracks and made for the welcome solitude of the stern deck, only to have Miggs clutch feverishly at his arm.
“I’m goin’ to get out of here, Nels! That damned bell – these here things—”
Yancy flung the groping hands away. He tried to control his terror. This ship – this Golconda – was nothing but a tramp trader. She’d been carrying a cargo of jungle animals for some expedition. The beasts had got loose, gone amuck, in a storm. There was nothing fantastic about it!
In answer, came the intermittent clang of the hidden bell below decks and the soft lapping sound of the water swishing through the thick weeds which clung to the ship’s bottom.
“Come on,” Yancy said grimly. “I’m goin’ to have a look around. We need food.”
He strode back through the waist of the ship, with Miggs shuffling behind. Feeling his way to the towering stern, he found the fog thinner, less pungent.
The hatc
h leading down into the stern hold was open. It hung before his face like an uplifted hand, scarred, bloated, as if in mute warning. And out of the aperture at its base straggled a spidery thing that was strangely out of place here on this abandoned derelict – a curious, menacing, crawling vine with mottled triangular leaves and immense orange-hued blossoms. Like a living snake, intertwined about itself, it coiled out of the hold and wormed over the deck.
Yancy stepped closer, hesitantly. Bending down, he reached to grasp one of the blooms, only to turn his face away and fall back with an involuntary mutter. The flowers were sickly sweet, nauseating. They repelled him with their savage odor.
“Somethin’—” Miggs whispered sibilantly, “is watchin’ us, Nels! I can feel it.”
Yancy peered all about him. He, too, felt a third presence close at hand. Something malignant, evil, unearthly. He could not name it.
“It’s your imagination,” he snapped. “Shut up, will you?”
“We ain’t alone, Nels. This ain’t no ship at all!”
“Shut up!”
“But the flowers there – they ain’t right. Flowers don’t grow aboard a Christian ship, Nels!”
“This hulk’s been here long enough for trees to grow on it,” Yancy said curtly. “The seeds probably took root in the filth below.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“Go forward and see what you can find. I’m goin’ below to look around.”
Miggs shrugged helplessly and moved away. Alone, Yancy descended to the lower levels. It was dark down here, full of shadows and huge gaunt forms that lost their substance in the coils of thick, sinuous fog. He felt his way along the passage, pawing the wall with both hands. Deeper and deeper into the labyrinth he went, until he found the galley.
The galley was a dungeon, reeking of dead, decayed food, as if the stench had hung there for an eternity without being molested; as if the entire ship lay in an atmosphere of its own – an atmosphere of the grave – through which the clean outer air never broke.
But there was food here; canned food that stared down at him from the rotted shelves. The labels were blurred, illegible. Some of the cans crumbled in Yancy’s fingers as he seized them – disintegrated into brown, dry dust and trickled to the floor. Others were in fair condition, air-tight. He stuffed four of them into his pockets and turned away.
Eagerly now, he stumbled back along the passage. The prospects of food took some of those other thoughts out of his mind, and he was in better humor when he finally found the captain’s cabin.
Here, too, the evident age of the place gripped him. The walls were gray with mold, falling into a broken, warped floor. A single table stood on the far side near the bunk, a blackened, grimy table bearing an upright oil lamp and a single black book.
He picked the lamp up timidly and shook it. The circular base was yet half full of oil, and he set it down carefully. It would come in handy later. Frowning, he peered at the book beside it.
It was a seaman’s Bible, a small one, lying there, coated with cracked dust, dismal with age. Around it, as if some crawling slug had examined it on all sides, leaving a trail of excretion, lay a peculiar line of black pitch, irregular but unbroken.
Yancy picked the book up and flipped it open. The pages slid under his fingers, allowing a scrap of loose paper to flutter to the floor. He stooped to retrieve it; then, seeing that it bore a line of penciled script, he peered closely at it.
The writing was an apparently irrelevant scrawl – a meaningless memorandum which said crudely:
It’s the bats and the crates. I know it now, but it is too late. God help me!
With a shrug, he replaced it and thrust the Bible into his belt, where it pressed comfortingly against his body. Then he continued his exploration.
In the wall cupboard he found two full bottles of liquor, which proved to be brandy. Leaving them there, he groped out of the cabin and returned to the upper deck in search of Miggs.
Miggs was leaning on the rail, watching something below. Yancy trudged toward him, calling out shrilly:
“Say, I got food, Miggs! Food and brand—”
He did not finish. Mechanically his eyes followed the direction of Miggs’ stare, and he recoiled involuntarily as his words clipped into stifled silence. On the surface of the oily water below, huge sea snakes paddled against the ship’s side – enormous slithering shapes, banded with streaks of black and red and yellow, vicious and repulsive.
“They’re back,” Miggs said quickly. “They know this ain’t no proper ship. They come here out of their hell-hole, to wait for us.”
Yancy glanced at him curiously. The inflection of Miggs’ voice was peculiar – not at all the phlegmatic, guttural tone that usually grumbled through the little man’s lips. It was almost eager!
“What did you find?” Yancy faltered.
“Nothin’. All the ship’s boats are hangin’ in their davits. Never been touched.”
“I found food,” Yancy said abruptly, gripping his arm. “We’ll eat; then we’ll feel better. What the hell are we, anyhow – a couple of fools? Soon as we eat, we’ll stock the dory and get off this blasted death ship and clear out of this stinkin’ fog. We got water in the tarpaulin.”
“We’ll clear out? Will we, Nels?”
“Yah. Let’s eat.”
Once again, Yancy led the way below decks to the galley. There, after a twenty-minute effort in building a fire in the rusty stove, he and Miggs prepared a meal, carrying the food into the captain’s cabin, where Yancy lighted the lamp.
They ate slowly, sucking the taste hungrily out of every mouthful, reluctant to finish. The lamplight, flickering in their faces, made gaunt masks of features that were already haggard and full of anticipation.
The brandy, which Yancy fetched out of the cupboard, brought back strength and reason – and confidence. It brought back, too, that unnatural sheen to Miggs’ twitching eyes.
“We’d be damned fools to clear out of here right off,” Miggs said suddenly. “The fog’s got to lift sooner or later. I ain’t trustin’ myself to no small boat again, Nels – not when we don’t know where we’re at.”
Yancy looked at him sharply. The little man turned away with a guilty shrug. Then hesitantly:
“I – I kinda like it here, Nels.”
Yancy caught the odd gleam in those small eyes. He bent forward quickly.
“Where’d you go when I left you alone?” he demanded.
“Me? I didn’t go nowhere. I – I just looked around a bit, and I picked a couple of them flowers. See.”
Miggs groped in his shirt pocket and held up one of the livid, orange-colored blooms. His face took on an unholy brilliance as he held the thing close to his lips and inhaled its deadly aroma. His eyes, glittering across the table, were on fire with sudden fanatic lust.
For an instant Yancy did not move. Then, with a savage oath, he lurched up and snatched the flower out of Miggs’ fingers. Whirling, he flung it to the floor and ground it under his boot.
“You damned thick-headed fool!” he screeched. “You – God help you!”
Then he went limp, muttering incoherently. With faltering steps he stumbled out of the cabin and along the black passageway, and up on the abandoned deck. He staggered to the rail and stood there, holding himself erect with nerveless hands.
“God!” he whispered hoarsely. “God-what did I do that for? Am I goin’ crazy?”
No answer came out of the silence. But he knew the answer. The thing he had done down there in the skipper’s cabin – those mad words that had spewed from his mouth – had been involuntary. Something inside him, some sense of danger that was all about him, had hurled the words out of his mouth before he could control them. And his nerves were on edge, too; they felt as though they were ready to crack.
But he knew instinctively that Miggs had made a terrible mistake. There was something unearthly and wicked about those sickly sweet flowers. Flowers didn’t grow aboard ship. Not real flowers. Real flow
ers had to take root somewhere, and, besides, they didn’t have that drunken, etherish odour. Miggs should have left the vine alone. Clinging at the rail there, Yancy knew it, without knowing why.
He stayed there for a long time, trying to think and get his nerves back again. In a little while he began to feel frightened, being alone, and he returned below-decks to the cabin.
He stopped in the doorway, and stared.
Miggs was still there, slumped grotesquely over the table. The bottle was empty. Miggs was drunk, unconscious, mercifully oblivious of his surroundings.
For a moment Yancy glared at him morosely. For a moment, too, a new fear tugged at Yancy’s heart – fear of being left alone through the coming night. He yanked Miggs’ arm and shook him savagely; but there was no response. It would be hours, long, dreary, sinister hours, before Miggs regained his senses.
Bitterly Yancy took the lamp and set about exploring the rest of the ship. If he could find the ship’s papers, he considered, they might dispel his terror. He might learn the truth.
With this in mind, he sought the mate’s quarters. The papers had not been in the captain’s cabin where they belonged; therefore they might be here.
But they were not. There was nothing – nothing but a chronometer, sextant, and other nautical instruments lying in curious positions on the mate’s table, rusted beyond repair. And there were flags, signal flags, thrown down as if they had been used at the last moment. And, lying in a distorted heap on the floor, was a human skeleton.
Avoiding this last horror, Yancy searched the room thoroughly. Evidently, he reasoned, the captain had died early in the Golconda’s unknown plague. The mate had brought these instruments, these flags, to his own cabin, only to succumb before he could use them.
Only one thing Yancy took with him when he went out: a lantern, rusty and brittle, but still serviceable. It was empty, but he poured oil into it from the lamp. Then, returning the lamp to the captain’s quarters where Miggs lay unconscious, he went on deck.
He climbed the bridge and set the lantern beside him. Night was coming. Already the fog was lifting, allowing darkness to creep in beneath it. And so Yancy stood there, alone and helpless, while blackness settled with uncanny quickness over the entire ship.
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 20