“Don’t reckon I need to say we’re three against who the fuck knows how many?” asked Haran, slipping his own sword from its scabbard. “No,” Iayn replied without looking. “Just thought it worth a check.”
Water dripped from the roof of the passage, the landing of drops echoing down into the darkness. It wasn’t impenetrable; some light was provided by burning torches set here and there, but it only made the darkness deeper, more like tar or oil.
Foss came up short, one hand up. “You hear that?” He kept his voice low, though it was still caught by the walls and sent off as a tiny echo.
A moment later, Iayn and Haran caught it; a low-sounding moan, rising in pitch as if it was coming towards them.
“Wind?” Haran asked.
“No,” Iayn said as he spread his feet, the tip of his sword coming level with his eyes.
The sound rose and fell, becoming more distinguishable as its source closed in on them. She came out of the dark; one minute, they only heard her, and then she was on top of Foss. He backed up in shock, batted his sword at her clumsily, and managed to overbalance himself.
The woman shrieked, raising long-fingered hands tipped with even longer nails filed to razor points. Something glinted at the ends, where they appeared sheathed in a thin layer of metal. She clawed frantically at Foss, managing to score his face before Iayn took her arm off just below the elbow — the sword parted skin and bone as easily as paper. She hardly noticed and swung her other hand, flattened like a spade, directly for Foss’ chest.
Haran split her skull, driving his blade down almost to the center of her face. She spasmed and her hand went limp, falling uselessly against Foss’ armor with a rattle of metal on metal. Haran helped Foss to his feet. One of his eyes was filled with blood, but it ran down his face as he stood, revealing the eye intact.
“Fuck, how bad is it?”
“You’re prettier than before,” Haran said, then clapped him on the shoulder and took a canteen from his belt to wash the worst of the blood away.
“Makes me about as pretty as you, then.”
Iayn stared down at the body. She was naked save for a rotten-looking animal pelt. Even with her face split, her eyes were still somehow frantic.
“It’s deep, but not bad,” Haran told Foss, stoppering the canteen. “It’ll bleed; nothing much we can do about that except keep it clean.”
Iayn faced them. “C’mon then, I don’t fancy waiting around here like rats in a box.”
Bodies appeared in the passage; first one, and then a second, and then more and more until it became difficult to walk over them. Foss, face still throbbing, knelt and examined one.
“This one cut his own throat.”
“Looks as if they killed themselves,” said Haran, leaning over another.
“Look for him.” Iayn knew the thin man wouldn’t be here, but they searched anyway.
The bodies led to a wide circular space, where they were spread out rather than almost piled together in the narrow confines of the passage. Again, each was dead by his or her own hand, some more violently than the others. It took some amount of will to cut your own throat or disembowel yourself; a kind of determination Haran, Foss, and Iayn couldn’t quite comprehend.
Iayn stood over one woman, her face a torn-up mess. The wounds and the blood and bits stuck to her hands held his focus until he felt, rather than heard, the walls breath. The suicide chamber, for lack of a better name, seemed very much alive. Iayn got the impression it had been holding its breath for a moment.
“This looks to be all of them,” said Foss. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“It does.” Iayn prodded one body with the toe of his boot. “Some of them have pieces missing.”
The walls pulsed as the breathing intensified — as if the place was waking up, but not due to their presence. They followed the passage, which continued only a short way after the suicide chamber, to its conclusion. A second, much smaller chamber greeted them — no, not a chamber, more like a tomb.
That was it, Iayn thought. It was a tomb, though not one meant for the dead. Quite the opposite.
A tremulous quiver ran through the stone, almost making it flap like cloth in a breeze.
It was a birthing tomb.
The thin man had his back to them. He faced an altar and though he must have heard them enter, he did not turn. Iayn saw the flash of the dagger, but then it was too late. Something ripped quickly, almost a whisper underneath the rapid breathing of the walls.
The thin man slumped forward and slid off the altar, his legs kicking fitfully as blood poured from the wound he’d inflicted on himself. Mostly in shadow, what lay on the altar was indistinct, but Iayn saw enough.
It was just tissue, but where before it was still, now it was animated like something washed up from the deep ocean. It did not rise, but opened like a mollusk — it was a trembling mass of pieced-together flesh. Just looking at it, Iayn found it hard to keep his mind from dribbling away a bit at a time. Perhaps only the presence of his friends kept him from running.
It slid off the altar, wet flesh grinding against old stone, and all but plopped to the floor. The sound put Foss in mind of meat dropped to the ground in an abattoir. Then it stood on legs thin as a bird’s.
“Run or fight?” Haran asked, fighting to keep his voice steady.
Though it lacked a head, it clearly turned to look at them. Slowly, but with mounting speed it came forward and made the choice for them.
Hitched as they were under a stand of stunted trees, the horses were spared the worst of the drizzle that poured down from the west. They bore it because they could do nothing else but wait for their riders to return.
A splash somewhere sent ripples through the water, and two of the horses flicked their ears towards the sound. Something sloshed through the water, heavy and slow, and all three turned in its direction.
The smell that followed set them to pulling at their reins, but they were knotted too tightly and the old leather refused to break as it came out of the mist towards them.
So close, the bird was truly monstrous.
Otherwhere
(Manuscript recovered by the whale ship Fury, arctic sea, 1845)
Screams from above reached sickbay, and I found Borr raving up above, covering the deck with bloody, smeared smiles. Three others held him as I opened my bag; his screams wound down to watery gurgles.
When I got him into sickbay later, I asked, knowing he wouldn’t live through the night, if there was anyone I should write to for him. We were passing into the arctic places and it might be some time before we could next put into port.
A certain kind of man may find himself on a ship and he will bring with him a certain kind of madness. In many ways, it’s looked for. I can’t say I am any different. I’m the doctor onboard, though not one onshore.
Think of the kinds of frustrations you would encounter in such a place. It’s the sort of environment where everything can be taken as a slight — someone talks too loudly, or a bad joke or annoying laugh follows you about in your head all day until you have the fellow’s eyes out over cards the same night.
Everyone exists at the point of violence, and there are few real things one can do to pass the time. Drinking yourself blind and gambling are the two chief activities, as well as fishing, but precious little else. Stranger men still were the ones who took up this last with enthusiasm. They weren’t really fishing; the water was far too deep to catch anything. They just stood at the rail with a rod in their hands, smiling at the ocean.
There were times when the sea decided to purge itself of something; something without eyes or tentacles, or something like a sphincter with a maw of needle teeth. When these things were offered up by the sea, these men found themselves engaged in a second’s violent murder, still smiling all the time.
Oft times I would take the creatures and what remained of them before they could cast them back to the depths. For my part, there was a certain medical curiosity.
Ot
her times, they wouldn’t cast them to the waves below, but into a cauldron or pot they set up on deck. They did not eat them, but dropped them into the boiling water only to see them change, or not. The cauldron’s own hunger for their offerings reflected the hunger each of them felt.
In truth, it was marked on all of our faces.
Ice becomes a fact of life when travelling in northern climes hunting for whales. It gets into your lungs, your skin; smell and pain become things you forget you had.
If strange men take to life onboard a ship, stranger women take to life in such ports as there are in the arctic places. There were always enough to keep us warm. A mixed bunch for sure: Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Poles, with the odd Scandinavian blonde thrown in here and there. None of the women in these places ever asked, “How much?” The exchange was only of heat and maybe some pleasure to relieve the boredom of daily life.
We came into one such port. It was the sort of place where fathers might lie with daughters in winter — where rats amounted to the town watch. We heard a story in what served as tavern, brothel, and hotel.
“There was a ship goin’ north, much as you boys are,” the old duffer said.
As long as we kept his cup filled, he was content to talk while we waited for our turn upstairs.
Not that I was taking part, but where the crew goes, it’s advisable for the doctor to follow.
“I’stead of findin’ whales, what they got was ice, and they was locked in for the winter.” He smiled, displaying a mouth mostly empty, save for a few stone-like teeth. “There was seals close by, so it weren’t so bad as all ‘at. They wasn’t goin’ to starve or nothing…naw, it was boredom what started to thin their faces.” He paused as a woman upstairs cried out, long and hard and much too much for show.
“The seals, ye see,” the old man tapped his temple knowingly. “They was too easy to kill, so there weren’t no fun in it. Then no booze, and they’d played cards so much, they knew every crease and crinkle in the deck so it weren’t no fun neither.”
He slid his battered mug across the table, and it was left to me to pour the rum to keep him talking.
“Some fella thought it’d be a grand idea to break out the guns. They made snowmen, see?
Dressed ‘em up in spare clothes; maybe imagined they was someone they didn’t like none. Heh, problem was once the shootin’ started, weren’t no stoppin’ it.”
A sailor, one of the younger ones from the crew, stumbled into the common room still doing his trousers up. His face practically glowed with warmth. Another quickly sidestepped a couple more who were half up before realizing they weren’t going to beat the other’s head start.
The old man continued, “They killed the seals first; shot ‘em all to pieces. Took ‘bout thirty minutes or so, but they run out of fun in the end.” He looked down and shuffled his feet. There was something genuine in the gesture, but practiced storytellers know how to lure an audience in.
“Back on the boat, they was in the middle of givin’ the guns back to the master-at-arms, when one bright spark lets his off at a friend. Just for a laugh, mind, but it weren’t long before they was shootin’ at each other and laughin’ all the while.” He presses a thumb and forefinger against the edges of his lips to stretch his smile. “They was all froze up when they found ‘em, with smiles like ‘at splittin’ their faces.”
Each of us understood what he was saying.
It wasn’t madness that killed them, but boredom. It’s a far more insidious disease and one which, as a doctor, I am unable to treat. Hence why we found ourselves in such a place as this rickety and chilly rat-hole of a port, where only terminally bored men come. With each man waiting his turn for a few moments of warmth and something, anything, to take the drudgery away, even if only for a little while before facing it again.
Several days later, we sighted a pod of whales breaching ahead of us to starboard. The prospect of work, our work, filled the crew with renewed vigor.
We no longer took things quite so personally as before. We could tolerate a laugh or bad joke because we could all taste the chance of action to take our minds off it. Such a change brought on its own dangers; a kind of mania not easily doused, even with drink. Indeed, it seemed as if some eye of madness settled over the ship and crew, just waiting for us to blink and consume ourselves.
I lost a patient on the second day of our pursuit. The result of an infection I failed to notice, once I treated the initial wound. A second died a day later, and I am not able to say for sure what killed him.
Shouts from the deck on the third day drew me topside, along with most of the others. Were the whales now within striking distance? I fancied I could almost hear the boats being lowered.
One was, in fact, but for a wholly different reason.
She was perhaps twenty or twenty-five, but no more, I should say. We never learned her name or age due to her being mute, though I could find no physical reason for her affliction.
We found her adrift in a battered boat, with no markings and nothing on her person to say where she might have come from. The Captain himself and two men he trusted stood watch at the door as I treated her. I could feel the rest of the crew pressing in through the walls and deck. She most definitely offered a distraction from boredom, though of the kind that could destroy the ship and the authority of the Captain.
“What can you say?” He loomed at my back, as unadmittedly eager to see her as the others, I suspected.
“Not much. She’s not eaten in more than a day and about the same for drink, if the state of her lips and mouth is anything to go by.”
“Not just salt burn?”
“No, but once we get her warm and fed, she should be alright,” was about the best I could offer.
“Anything in her clothes say much?”
She wasn’t naked on the table, though her dress was so soaked as to be nearly transparent. “No, and we checked the jacket she’d been wrapped in.” I waved to where the assistant was washing it. “Just a sailor’s pea coat; could’ve come from any ship you care to mention.”
“Any gazettes I have will be long out of date,” he said as he sucked his tongue. “No way of knowing what ships would be up this way.”
“Someone gave her that jacket, or was with her in the boat.”
The idea she might’ve pushed a dead man into the water wasn’t as far-fetched as you might think. The sea changes people, strips away compassion until there’s nothing but rationality as cold as the waves.
“Will she be able to walk about once she’s awake?”
“I wouldn’t advise it, but if I’d been a long time alone on a boat, I might feel the need to stretch my legs.”
“Could be a problem.” “Aye, that it could.”
Before she came onboard, the crew could be said to act as one body, with the Captain acting as its head. Now we were following her with our own eyes and using our own minds. Where once there was a crew, there was now only a group of individuals. This is why women are not permitted onboard ship.
I saw it and so did the Captain, though neither of us was immune to it. As I feared, she walked even when she was barely able.
I had her clothes washed and pressed and a bath drawn for her in sickbay — I waited outside the door, of course. Hot water and relatively clean clothes restored some measure of color to her hair and skin. Though her black curls were in need of another woman’s touch, the crew would no doubt have been eager to volunteer to fill such a position.
Once dressed, she drifted about sickbay for a bit while I tossed questions at her. She ignored them and examined the shelves lining the walls. Odd, and she made odd, bobbing movements of her head here and there. I swear she butted her nose gently against one or two of the glass jars.
There was something off-putting about the way she walked, her head moving in time with her steps. Like a bird. But I said nothing and put it down to her time in the boat, God alone knew how long that may have been.
She either was truly
mute or had suffered some sort of psychic break during her time at sea. I can’t say either way, though she understood if I told her not to touch something. She went everywhere with the black sailor’s coat draped about her shoulders. Likely it served as a kind of talisman, most probably because it was the only thing to provide any degree of comfort to her in recent days.
Once on deck, and even with me trailing a bit behind her, it was a different matter. The men avoided her, but couldn’t help but stare after her. She repeated the same odd pattern of walking, eyes blinking as she tilted her head from side to side while examining something.
From his position near the wheel, the Captain enjoyed a view of the main deck. His gaze held the men in line, but it was a fraying cord at best. We both sensed it, so he descended to walk among the crew. A hard look or nudge here and there would, he probably thought, restore his authority.
It was also my cue to get her back below. In the end, neither thing happened.
It was Nils.
What to say about Nils? Swedish by birth, he was quick to throw in at cards. Too quiet for the liking of most of the crew, except when he drank — which had been often of late.
I never saw him reaching behind me to take me unawares and so make for the girl, along with any else who wanted.
The Captain saw and grabbed his hand.
Nils had his knife out before anyone could stop him. As I turned at the commotion, Nils flicked his hand out and ended the Captain where he stood. I couldn’t stop the bleeding, and four men pinned Nils to the deck. It took two more to hold him in place, his eyes rolling wildly and spittle flying from his mouth as he shouted and raved.
No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) Page 2