I climbed the ladder to the deck and consulted with Nate. We must stop, I told him. Could he not hear how the boat was cavilling? Could he not feel it?
He could, of course, but there was a grim fixity of purpose about him that prevented him from admitting it. Charley was still coming for us. Even above the Belle’s calamitous rumblings, we could hear him hooting and howling some few hundred yards to our rear. We had not built up nearly as much of a lead as we would have liked. Nate ordered me to go back below and carry on shovelling. I did as bidden, albeit not without hesitation. The engine room was hellish, an inferno of heat and noise, clanking, thundering, hissing, smoke-choked, lit by the furnace’s red glare – a foretaste of damnation, one might say. I, poor suffering soul, bent to my task once more. Mentally I cursed Nate’s name with each shovel-load of fuel I heaved from the coal hopper into the furnace’s maw. I blamed him for our predicament, yet knew myself to be as much at fault. It was simply a question of whose hubris had been greater, mine or his. I reckoned him the more culpable of us twain, but only by a tiny margin.
Of the explosion, I have no memory whatsoever. I cannot even say definitively that it occurred at all, yet the evidence is incontrovertible. I need only look at my left hand, or rather where my left hand used to be. I need only glance in a mirror and behold the twisted ruin of one half of my face, my left eye just visible as it peers from its tight, puckered hollow. The scars I bear attest immutably to the violent detonation of which I was the proximal victim, but when I try to recollect it, I draw a blank. I do not remember a vast thunderclap of noise, or a sudden powerful concussion, or being hurled bodily across the engine room to fetch up against the bulkhead. I know all this must have happened, but a precise and unbreachable amnesia has set in, drawing a veil across the incident for ever. For that, I suppose I should be thankful.
This much I do recall: one moment I was diligently shovelling coal. The next, Nate was dragging me off the burning boat, down the gangplank, onto the bank. I was dazed. I was disorientated. Somehow I realised I was in terrific pain but I did not register it as such. I was disconnected from it. It seemed too huge for my mind to encompass.
I lay on the bank, watching through one eye – the other refused to open for some reason – as Nate scrambled back onto the Belle and hastened to his cabin. I remember asking myself why he would return to the boat when half of her was engulfed in flames and she was listing to starboard. It was madness even to contemplate boarding a vessel so evidently doomed. Yet Nate was on an errand of some urgency, and it was only when he emerged from the cabin with a bulky black book under his arm that comprehension dawned. The Necronomicon was, it appeared, too precious to be left behind.
I must have passed out briefly, for the next thing I recall is seeing the Belle, now aflame from end to end, heeling over. The river partially extinguished the conflagration, and steam billowed up in a great cloud, but the portion of the boat that remained above water continued to burn lustily. The roar and crackle of blazing timbers was tremendous. The incandescence, in the dark, was blinding.
There was another spell of insensibility, and then I was aware of Nate shaking me. His voice was fraught with panic. “Zach. Zach! You must wake up. You must get up. He is coming. He is near.”
I did not need to ask who “he” was. Charley. He had made up ground. He was, to judge by the hound-like baying coming through the trees, but a few hundred yards distant.
I strove to stand but failed. Even with Nate’s assistance it was useless. The pain that had seemed so far removed was beginning to permeate through to me, like a gas lamp being steadily brightened. I caught sight of my left hand and saw a bloodied, shredded mess. I screamed then, with everything I had in me. I screamed in agony and in loss and in fury and in horror. I screamed until my chest throbbed and my throat was raw.
When the screams subsided to sobs and I was more in control of my faculties, I looked up to find that Nate was gone. Without a word, without the least attempt to aid me further, he had abandoned me.
Then Charley came crashing through the undergrowth. Lit sidelong by the glow from the burning Belle, he was a figure of shadows and lambent orange, demonic in the darkness. I was certain then that my time had come. I could not rise. I could not run. I could not protect myself in any way. Charley stalked towards me, a great ghoulish grin on his face. At last I perceived what lurked within him. It was Junior Brenneman. I am sure of it. Junior was present in that gleeful leer, albeit a twisted, tormented version. He had been driven past sanity by the Intercranial Cognition Transference, his sense eroded until only a residue remained, the worst of him, all the hatred and truculence and prejudice, the dregs.
This was all my doing. Mine and Nate’s. I accepted this, and in my helpless, pain-wracked condition, as I watched Junior – it was definitely Junior – shamble closer and closer still, I almost welcomed what lay in store for me. Let him slay me with his bare hands. I deserved it.
Junior staggered. He looked down at his chest. All at once there was an arrow shaft sprouting from it. A second appeared alongside, embedded in his ribcage, its fletched end quivering. Then a third, a fourth…
Junior advanced a couple of steps further, then faltered. The mighty machine of Charley’s body, pierced deep by four arrows, was shutting down. A fifth arrow entered Junior’s skull through the eye socket. His head snapped back. He tottered and toppled. He fell mere inches away from me, crashing to earth like a redwood after the final blow from the lumberjack’s axe – quilled with arrows and quite dead.
I, once again, passed out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
What Motivates a Monster
THERE IS NOT MUCH MORE TO TELL. BY THAT I mean that the ensuing events may be summarised thus: I was saved.
My saviours were Wampanoag Indians, the very same band of Pocasset braves with whom we had met and parleyed a fortnight earlier. To them, and in the main to their sachem Amos Russell, also known as Swift Brown Bear, I owe my life. I cannot put it more plainly than that. First of all, Russell bound my wounds, having applied beforehand a certain salve made from chokecherry bark, which augments healing and staves off infection. (This ancient native remedy proved as efficacious in its function as any modern medicine, if not more so.) Then he ordered his cohorts to fashion a travois from birch branches and a blanket, and I, bound by leather thongs to this canted stretcher, was dragged all the way to Fort Fredericks, a journey of some four and a half days by foot. Nate walked with us but not once did he assume the burden of the travois and its passenger. That was a task the Indians alone undertook. All Nate carried was the Necronomicon, swaddled in his jacket and pressed to his chest like a babe in arms.
Let me state it again: the hunting party of Wampanoag Indians saved me. They saved Nate too. Having been summoned to the scene by the tumult of the Belle’s demise, they arrived just in time to see me being menaced by Junior-in-Charley. Their deadly intervention not only bought my life but Nate’s as well, for there is no doubt that once our adversary had despatched me he would have gone after Nate and done his utmost to visit the same fate upon him. We owe our continued existence to the Indians’ courage and the accuracy of their arrows.
Nate was – and is – well aware of that. My understanding is that when he ran away, leaving me to face Junior alone, he did not go far before espying the Indians. He witnessed them slaying Junior and then tending to me. Realising that these men presented his best hope of rescue, he emerged from hiding and threw himself on their mercy. Although I was not conscious to see it, I imagine he approached them with a mixture of swagger and sheepishness as only he could manage.
Now, of course, he would have everyone believe that the Wampanoag were responsible for the Miskatonic expedition’s disastrous conclusion. Out of the blue, unprovoked, the Indians launched an attack on us which only Nate and I survived. They killed the Belle’s three crewmen and set the steamer alight, and Nate and I only just managed to get away. That is a calumny I have done my bit to promote, and I regret
it now and hereby recant. I am setting the record straight. The contents of this account are the truth, pure and unadulterated. Nate Whateley has lied; I have lied; but only one of us is sorry that he did.
* * *
After depositing us at the gates of Fort Fredericks, the Indians took their leave, but not before Amos Russell had this to say to us: “I do not know what you did back there upriver. I do not wish to know. It is clear, all the same, judging by the demon in man’s guise that attacked you, that you ignored my advice and strayed into territory where you did not belong. The price you have paid is terrible, and I trust you have learned your lesson. Would that white men could be confined to reservations, as we Indians are, so that they may stay where they are safe and can bring harm neither to themselves nor to others.”
With that wry admonition and a hand raised in a solemn wave, the sachem and his companions departed. Only when they were out of earshot did Nate murmur something uncomplimentary about savages not knowing their place.
A fur trapper in Fort Fredericks had some facility as an amateur doctor. Upon examining me, he determined that the remainder of my hand must go, so that gangrene did not set in. He was concerned about my left eye, too, but reckoned it salvageable. Once the burnt tissue surrounding it healed, I should be able to reopen it, if only partway.
He proceeded to ply me with whiskey until I was so drunk I could barely move. Dimly I was conscious of this rough-and-ready, ruddy-cheeked fellow strapping me to a table and applying a tourniquet to my left arm above the elbow. Then there were hacking, rasping noises, which it took me a while to register as the sound of a large serrated knife working through the bones, tendons and muscles of my wrist. The pain, as the crude surgical procedure was conducted, was severe. Somehow worse, however, was the attendant sensation of tugging and pulling, my arm being treated much as though it were a joint of meat on the butcher’s block.
He did a decent job, that much I can say. Under the circumstances, the fur-trapper-cum-sawbones (whose name, if I ever learned it, I do not recall) acquitted himself well. He left a flap of skin, which he folded over the stump and sewed up with cotton thread, and the finished product – as I look at it now, some months on – is tidier and far less unsightly than it might otherwise have been. Dr Champlain, our family physician in Boston, has pronounced it as good an example of “homespun resection” as he has ever seen.
Nate secured us passage on the next supply boat that called in at the outpost town. We shared a cramped, poorly appointed cabin aboard the humble vessel, and on the way to Arkham, I challenged him more than once over the way he had deserted me in my hour of need, as I had lain helpless with pain and Junior had loomed menacingly before me. Nate made some excuse about going to find a weapon, perhaps a tree branch with which to repel Junior, and I wanted to believe him but somehow could not. It was quite clear to me that he had been saving his own neck.
In turn, throughout the journey Nate prevailed upon me to corroborate a different version of the expedition’s outcome than the one we had both experienced – a version in which neither of us was at fault and the blame for the catastrophe was the Indians’. I should think of the disgrace that might result, he said, from revealing all that had gone awry. It would be tantamount to professional suicide. Who would ever grant either of us sponsorship or patronage in our future endeavours, knowing what we had unleashed? Our names would be mud forever after. We would be the butt of ridicule and perhaps also the subject of criminal proceedings. Better by far to stick to a story which, though false, had at least some basis in fact, and exonerated us from all accountability. We did meet with Wampanoag Indians, after all. We did have a disagreement with them, of sorts. We did watch them kill one of our number. These things could not be gainsaid. So why not exaggerate somewhat? There was no one alive who could contradict us, no one save the Indians themselves, who would not be believed even if they could be tracked down in order to give testimony. Our word against theirs? No contest.
My every instinct rebelled against going along with this. I could see Nate now for what he was: corrupt, innately devious, recklessly destructive to all around him. I had almost died because of his actions. Charley, Junior and the skipper had died because of his actions. I knew I should go to the authorities and tell them the truth, whatever the consequences for me.
But damn him, his words made a kind of sense, increasingly so the more he harped on at his theme. In the end I found myself overcoming my misgivings and consenting to his proposal. I was in a way complicit in his misdeeds, a partner in crime, and the last thing I wanted was to become a pariah. There was a stain forever attached to my soul, and to Nate’s, but was it not better if only we two knew of it?
* * *
Once we were back in Arkham, I endured a spell in hospital, where I was interviewed by a police detective. After it was finished, the man looked over his notes and seemed satisfied. In fact the interview had been, he said, little more than a formality. My account of events jibed in every respect with the one already given him by Mr Whateley, and hence the matter, as far as he was concerned, was closed. The detective wished me a speedy recovery and left.
When I was well enough to be discharged, the first person I went to see was Nate. He had not visited me in hospital, which I felt more than a little slighted about. At his lodgings, however, I found him packing up his belongings. I arrived just as he was loading the last of his menagerie of biological aberrations onto the back of a covered wagon. He seemed surprised to see me, and his manner was, I think, furtive.
In his near-empty rooms I enquired where he was off to. He was evasive. “Staying with relatives” was all he would say, appending some vague remark about “relocating to Europe thereafter, England most likely”.
“Nate,” I said, “it upsets me that you would consider departing without even so much as a goodbye. It upsets me, too, that you have let me languish in hospital without calling by once. Even Lake had the decency to come to see me, and he and I are on the outs.”
“I have been busy,” Nate said. “Of course you have never been far from my thoughts, Zach, but I have been musing at length on our little river excursion and its unfortunate dénouement, and I feel that, in my own best interests, I should put some distance between me and Arkham. Alas, that means putting distance between me and you as well. I am sorry about that.” He could have sounded sorrier. “Even just to look at you,” he went on, “pains me. It is a reminder that we ought to have been more careful. We should not have rushed into doing what we did. Intercranial Cognition Transference is not safe. That much is apparent to me now. You have suffered more than I as a result of our intemperance, and you will bear the mark for the rest of your days, but lest we forget, I myself have suffered too. In financial terms alone—”
I burst forth with vituperation. “Financial terms? I have lost a hand, Nate! I am disfigured for life! This face of mine, which was not unhandsome once, now elicits winces of disgust and moues of pity. Even from you – I can see it. I am an object of revulsion and sympathy, and I will always be. Do you know how that feels? Can you have any inkling? I doubt it. And now here you are, casting me aside like a broken plaything. You would have gone from Arkham without my knowledge, had I not chanced along when I did. I thought you my friend. How wrong can a man be?”
He made to console me, but I would have none of it. “What is more,” I said, and I was in full spate now, “I had plenty of time to think while lying in that hospital bed. Plenty of time to go over the events of the expedition and especially the events of the night the shoggoth came to life and attacked, for that was the pivotal moment, the moment when it all turned sour.”
Again and again I had revisited the incident in my mind. I had focused in particular on the footfalls I had heard after Junior started screaming. My assumption at the time had been that they belonged to someone going to Junior’s aid. That was why I had plucked up the courage to exit my cabin. But of course, when Nate and I reached the boat’s stern, there had been nobody the
re except Junior, who was being mauled by the shoggoth. I had not marked this inconsistency then, and amid the hectic horror of that night and the distractions of the days following, I had given it no further thought.
But with the leisure to reflect while in hospital, I had realised that the footfalls must have been – could only have been – Nate’s. They had gone past my cabin, not towards Junior, but the other way, towards Nate’s cabin. When I had headed out on deck and caught sight of Nate in his doorway, he had not been on the point of leaving but, rather, had been returning. He had, in other words, been somewhere else immediately prior.
“How did the shoggoth awaken, Nate?” I asked. “How did it slip its bonds and crawl up onto the boat? How did it find Junior?”
“Who can say what motivates a monster?” Nate replied airily.
“Did the shoggoth come round of its own accord – or was it roused? Did someone perchance recite an incantation, deriving the requisite wording from a certain book, and deliberately wake it from its slumber? Did that same someone then rouse Junior and summon him outside on some pretext, before leaving him to the shoggoth’s tender mercies?”
“These are absurd accusations. Do you even know what you are saying, Zach? Listen to yourself. What rot!”
The vehemence of these protests, the heatedness with which Nate maintained his innocence, only inclined me further towards thinking him guilty as charged.
The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Page 25