Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  Adding to this anxiety, McConnell was exhausted; the strange dreams had been intensifying during the past two days the Higgins had been anchored near the uncharted atoll.

  “Command Merritt, Ensign Adams, come in. Over.” Static, a little radio interference. All freqs.

  McConnell was homesick, too. They were scheduled for some leave after this last deployment researching low-frequency sonar, and he was glad to be done with it; the heartbreaking damage to the whales and their hearing was obvious when the dead ones floated to the surface. Who knew what else it did to the fragile marine environment, but they had documented some things, from devastating ecosystems to destabilizing underwater superstructures. Where did it all end? Not with massive underwater blowouts, apparently, or man-made earthquakes in the Midwest caused by hydraulic fracking, or the murder of animals caused by human intervention in their environments . . . He felt it was all so destructive, unnatural, evil.

  “This is McConnell. Do you read, Adams? Over.”

  XVI.

  Faust led the way out of the ruins; along with Commander Merritt, the horrific fungus had claimed two other men. Finally on the beach, as faintly bioluminescent waves lapped the windswept shore, hissing into the dark sand, Adams could see the lights of the Higgins off in the frigid distance. His walkie-talkie was useless; luckily their flashlights still worked for the time being. The ground shook again, adding to the tension on the beach.

  “Great! We’re trapped here on this insane fucking rock until morning . . . ” Adams lamented, looking from the silent Faust to the other man, his breath trailing into the void. The man was a young enlisted that he vaguely recognized, but could not place by name. “And you are?”

  “Seaman Recruit Anderson, sir.” The man was visibly upset, but also seemed relieved to be on the strand, even in the extreme cold of the pre-dawn. “Never seen nothing like that back home in North Carolina, sir. Whatever had that girl . . . It was bad. Something real bad.”

  Adams nodded in a feeble attempt at reassurance, turning to face the Higgins out at sea, mentally struggling to figure out what to do next. “Yes, it sure—”

  Abruptly, Faust tackled Adams from the rear, slamming him to the ground. The two thrashed on the damp earth while the stunned Anderson looked on, his light starkly flaring over the men writhing on the black sand. As they fought, Faust gained the upper hand, biting into Adams’s cheek and savagely tearing a meaty chunk of flesh from the ensign’s face, laying bare teeth, gums, bone. Adams was too panicked to think or feel— he reacted by unsheathing his machete and swinging wildly, yelling into the cold, dry night air . . .

  The heavy blade found its mark, and cleanly separated Faust’s arm from his body: He never screamed or made a sound, but in the cool LED illumination of Anderson’s flashlight, a strange, acrid black smoke poured forcefully from both ends of the bloodless stump. Faust’s mouth twisted in a silent mockery of pain; already the severed arm was crawling away in the surf, the end bulging with new growth, as the stump on his body began to display the withered approximation of a regenerated appendage, covered in mucus and red gore; overcome by the bizarre tableau, Anderson and Adams screamed in unified revulsion.

  Faust, bloodied and determined, came at them, his half formed arm quickly developing into a grisly, formidably hooked caricature of a human limb. Then his mouth opened, splitting past the natural hinge of his jaw as a great beaked face—its knobby flesh translucent all the way to an eyeless skull tufted by a delicate lattice of pinfeathers matted with opalescent slime—erupted from the gaping, bloody maw that had been Christopher Faust, but was no longer. The same vaporous black smoke spewed from his destroyed facial orifices, obscuring the flashlight beam.

  As the creature closed the distance between the stunned sailors, the entire island unexpectedly shifted . . . half-sinking into the deep, flooding the beach and creating an enormous wave as the morning sun seeped redly above the horizon.

  It was beginning.

  XVII.

  “I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

  A pause—

  A revelation—

  A comprehension—

  “The other shape,

  If shape it might be call’d that shape had none

  Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;

  Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,

  For each seem’d either—black it stood as night,

  Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,

  And shook a dreadful dart. What seem’d his head

  The likeness of a kingly crown had on.”

  XVIII.

  “Shit!”

  McConnell felt the shockwave on the Higgins just as he was about to drift off to sleep. It rolled past the ship, causing it to lurch sidewise in the water. Looking from his porthole, he could see the breaking dawn just clear the horizon, touching the clouds with fire. Where are the islands? Then he saw . . . it, and had to rub his bleary eyes in disbelief.

  It started as a soft rolling on the water; then an object more than a mile across thrust up from the sea, perhaps a couple of hundred feet from the USS Higgins. The shape dwarfing the destroyer was vast; it seemed to sparkle from within as though some swallowed ancient-future galaxy shone through its ebon, sea-drenched skin. In another eternal instant, the great being—dripping with kelp and seawater, glimmering in the vivid dawn like some unearthly, newborn titan—reared up to its full, multistoried height.

  McConnell’s bladder voided unconsciously when he realized it was alive, and many thoughts crossed his mind: Was this Satan? Or maybe an angel . . . Mother said that angels were fearsome creatures, not these little winged babies… Perhaps this was God itself?

  Gripping the window opening, his knuckles taut, as he staredat the dreadful leviathan, McConnell’s mind began to disengage.Somewhere, far away, it seemed, the sound of his ragged screams deafened him, as his overwhelmed consciousness triedto understand this being, to grasp the purpose of its hideous beauty. On the misty horizon, he noticed another giant rising up;this one was slightly different, but just as enormous . . distantly,there was yet another on the skyline . . . and then another . . .They seemed to pull the very light from the firmament, gradually enrobed by wispy fringes of nightfall—as though theirpresence created a void in the fabric of life itself. As he watched, a great vortex began swirling in the ocean around the behemoth, slowly opening up and swallowing the destroyer . . .It was at that moment he realized something had changed inthe world, and before the icy sting of Antarctic saltwater filledhis nose and mouth, McConnell realized how lucky he was—indeed everyone aboard the doomed Higgins was—to bespared the horrors yet to come.

  The great thing howled and his brain jellied, his ears bled, but the last thing McConnell saw before his consciousness was snuffed by the incomprehensible and his corneas stiffened from the freezing cold of the sea rushing in to fill him—to crush him, to wipe him from the memory of humankind—was the baleful sun blotted out by the extension of terrible, massive wings.

  Flesh and Bones

  Nancy Kilpatrick

  “Please! We need to experience this! We have money to donate.”

  Joe thought that the old priest closing the door for the day must have heard the supplicant in Marielle’s tone. Or noticed the obsessive flicker in her eyes. Or possibly it was simply religious compassion that compelled the man to open wide the huge wooden door and say something in Italian that neither Joe nor Marielle could decipher.

  Marielle was closest, Joe right behind her, his body pressed lightly up against her too-warm flesh until they followed the priest in, trailed by a small group of five that had gathered, configurations of tourists who also demanded entrance to the Capuchin Church of the Immaculate Conception. Or, more specifically, to its bowels, the Capuchin Crypt.

  The black-robed priest stepped as
ide and they entered, congregating just inside the door, waiting for him to move his hunched body to the table and sit so that he could collect a few euros from each visitor. Pamphlets were available on a rack for those who wanted them, and Joe snagged two, one in English for himself, one for Marielle in French, a euro each.

  Individually and in couples they all went down the half-dozen stone steps and then started along the corridor that Joe estimated to be about sixty feet in length, with six ‘rooms’ on the left side.

  This was the most recent crypt on their itinerary, a tour that had Joe and Marielle traveling from their home in Montréal to various places around the world to investigate human remains in the form of bones (her) and mummified flesh (him). Over the last twenty years, since they’d met and married, they had traveled as often as they could, every year on a four- to six-week holiday, searching out exotic and macabre locations.

  This year, Joe’s tenure at McGill University allowed for an eight-month sabbatical. Marielle had taken a very early retirement from her senior supervisory position with the Quebec government two years before. “I won’t live forever,” she’d said. “I want to devote my remaining time to my art.”

  And Joe understood that only too well. Her decision had accelerated his own need. He was as dedicated to mummies as she was to bones. And even after completing ninety-nine percent of this four-month trip through Europe and the United Kingdom at tremendous expense, covering many dozens of bone crypts and mummy museums, neither was ready to go home, although, at the moment, Marielle’s pet project called more loudly to her than did Joe’s to him.

  Like all crypts, the lighting here was subdued, funereal, the occasional small vent providing filtered natural light, creating an ambiance that suited the dead. The scent of centuries of dust and old mold permeated the cool air mixed with a tinge of the traditional tallow from church candles. And while the others hurried through, surreptitiously snapping photos despite the picture of a camera in a circle with a red slash through it, Joe and Marie lingered. They took photos also, but with the spy cameras each had acquired, two by two inches, Marielle’s on a key ring, Joe’s disguised as a pen. Years ago they had realized that too many crypts, ossuaries, and museums did not permit photographs. They needed photos, not merely as reminders, or mental souvenirs as Marielle called them, and not just to help with their personal projects, but more, to keep their spirits buoyed between trips when they could experience these wondrous remains in person and not just in books and on the Internet.

  Joe reached the first room on the left. Inside stood a marble altar, a metal cross atop with the usual INRI inscribed over the crucified figure of Christ, and he felt a bit disappointed. Marielle was ahead of him, just passing beneath the corridor’s first arched doorway that led to the rest of the rooms. She stopped dead, looked up, then turned to him with awe saturating her features and silently pointed above her head at the ceiling. He stepped aside to let the last of the other tourists pass who were ready to flee what they and most people likely deemed a place too morbid to enjoy. Joe joined Marielle and looked up.

  Above their heads hung a large chandelier created from human bones, brown and smooth with age and sprinkled with crypt dust. “Mainly tibia and fibula,” she mumbled softly, her voice reverent, “and the tarsals, of course,” but Joe heard her.

  “That looks like a clavicle at the center,” he said, pointing, and she nodded.

  Bones were what entranced her. She said now what she had said so often in so many ways, “They reduce us to our essence. It’s the bottom line of the physical. After that, there is only l’esprit,n’est pas?”

  He understood her fascination. He shared it, but not to the same extent. His focus was elsewhere.

  He looked ahead, not even glancing toward the second room on the left, wanting to build the tension of his excitement because he knew what was coming. He often thought how this resembled sexual tension, allowing the erotic to expand and rise and finally release, like an orgasm. Yes, it was very much like an orgasm. And he could wait.

  He continued along the corridor with Marielle. Unlike Les Catacombes de Paris, these bones were not simply piles of femurs and tibias and skulls artistically arranged; most if not all the bones of the body had been fashioned into shapes, objects. Several hearts lined the corridor wall, composed mainly of carpals and metacarpals, the small bones of the hand that would allow for a rounded shape. The second arch they walked beneath and those ahead were decorated in a kind of filigree pattern with cervical and thoracic vertebrae making for a very pretty and welcoming lace-like design to the entrances.

  He still ignored the contents of the rooms for the moment, teasing himself, and headed further up the short corridor until he reached the back wall, admiring the artistry along the way.

  This wall and the ceiling were crammed with images, and he was, as always in places like this, astonished by the number of skulls. A clock had been formed, the frame of cervical, thoracic, and lumbar vertebrae and ribs, the Roman numerals employing metatarsals and phalanges of the feet but perhaps also the metacarpals and phalanges of the hands—sometimes these bones looked the same to him, but then, unlike Marielle, he was no ossa expert.

  Marielle whispered, “Look! L’Horloge!” The clock had only one hand, he noticed. And as if reading his mind, as so frequently happened, she said, “Time has neither beginning nor end.”

  There were flowers, vases, crosses of course, but the most elaborate sculpture was a grim reaper, an entire skeleton, dwarf-size, the skull large, gripping in its bony hands a bone scythe on one side of its body, and a scale in balance on the other.

  “Oh!” Marielle cried when she saw it, deeply moved and completely enthralled, and he smiled. He loved her passion for bones. She could be profound in her insights, making connections that he struggled to get to, likely because she could really comprehend how all 206 bones in an adult human body fit together and experienced the beauty of that completeness; this helped him accept his own fixations, which, he believed, required much more work to grasp.

  Here and there a bone had fallen out of an image from the wall or ceiling in the hallway, never to be replaced but crushed underfoot, and when she noticed, she scanned the dirt floor, finding two pieces of cervical vertebrae and what must be a coccyx. Quickly and surreptitiously she pocketed these after a glance to make sure the priest was not watching. This was illegal, of course: they often mailed them home disguised in objets d’art they purchased, since getting human remains through airport security proved nearly impossible. But Marielle needed these for her work. She had bones from around the world, piecing them together carefully, a life’s mission, to collect every adult bone and build a composite skeleton, an everyman, well, everywoman—the pelvis she had found was female. He admired her devotion to her craft. His own artwork required little in the way of props, just time and study.

  Marielle was so taken with the artwork that she had yet to peer into the rooms built from the foundations of this church. They were alone now, and Joe valued the silence, the priest at the end of the corridor quietly, patiently reading.

  He walked back up the corridor slowly, finally allowing himself a quick glance into each room, his heart pounding with excitement. These were three-walled, plus floor and ceiling, open at the front, built of the same dusty grey stone, and dimly lit.

  Each room presented a kind of tableau created by bones, mostly skulls and crossed-bones—the only ones the early church believed were required for resurrection because, they determined, thinking and emotion were housed in the head, and one only needed the leg bones to stand for ascension.

  Joe remembered re-reading on the Internet that morning that monks who had fled the French Revolution in the 1700s had come to join this church, built in 1642. Over the next century and a bit, four thousand of them had died here, their remains contributing to the ghastly decor. The Marquis de Sade had visited this crypt in 1775 and deemed it “an example of funerary art worthy of an Eng
lish mind,” created “by a German priest who lived in this house.” But, in fact, the person or person who had arranged the contents of this crypt remained unknown, and that suited Joe. He wanted to keep this perfect blend of his and Marielle’s interests anonymous.

  There were altars, naturally, with crosses above, rounded or squared or rectangular tables and beds, all built from bones. But this is not what caused the adrenalin to rush through Joe’s body. What set his heart quivering were those who sat or reclined in or stood near the bed-like niches along the side walls. These stone shelves were the final resting places for the remains of mummified monks, their dark, leathery skin with empty eye sockets and remaining yellowed teeth, the bones of hands and arms and feet extending from the sleeves and hems of the dusty brown robes with hoods they wore and tied at the waist with rough hemp belts. Each exposed face was unique, full of expression, so alive to Joe that he felt they were drawing him closer, wanting him near enough to converse with. He gasped in delight, then quickly looked down the corridor. The priest had looked up.

  Joe turned away and took a few steps toward the front of the corridor, gazing at the ceiling, then stopped again, and out of the corner of his eye saw that the priest had returned to his reading.