Polaris

by Michael Northrop

  In between the arms and legs was another set of segmented limbs: half the size of the others, the appendages hanging from the creature’s sides, twitching with odd little spasms and dripping the same slime that glazed Obed’s face. Half-formed, she realized. Incomplete.

  She had taken in all of this instantly, the way she could take in the ship, the sky above, and the sea beyond in a single flash of lightning. But the frozen moment passed, and the world came crashing back.

  “Dear L-Lord above,” stammered Thacher from across the barrel. “It is Obed Macy!”

  “It is not him,” called Owen. “It cannot be.”

  Emma said nothing, but she knew that, somehow, they were both right.

  For a few seconds, the creature just stood there in the center of the passage, its barbed arms spread wide to form a fearsome barrier, its thin antennas swaying. Emma’s brain reeled. The sight was clear and vivid but it seemed impossible. The real and the fantastic collided like waves breaking against a rocky cliff.

  And then the creature opened its mouth. Emma saw Obed Macy’s lips part beneath the thin layer of slime. A thick tongue flicked out into the light, fuzzy and fetid and white, as if made of old milk and soft cloth.

  Hehhhhhhhhhhhh, it hissed, and with the hiss came an overwhelming scent of sweet decay. Emma slapped her hand over her mouth and nose.

  “Back to the forward hatch!” called Aaron, sounding the retreat.

  Emma turned to look back up the passage, and as she did, she saw Henry. He hadn’t said a word this whole time, and now she saw why. His mouth hung open in horror and awe, but it was his eyes that struck her most. A beam of light fell squarely on them from above and she read his expression. Fear, yes, but also recognition. He wore the look of a boy having a sudden realization. Has he seen something like this before? she wondered. How is that even possible?

  “We cannot!” shouted Owen. “That hatch is still covered.”

  There would be no going back, and as if understanding that, the creature came for them. It lurched forward, dragging its barbed feet heavily across the wet wood, producing an all-too-familiar dragging sound. Emma whipped her head back around in time to see a spasm shoot through the creature’s armored body. All six of its limbs twitched, knocking it slightly off balance as it took its next step.

  But still it shambled forward.

  Its murderous, barbed arms twitched and swayed in the air just a few yards away as she and the others reluctantly gave ground, backing away from the only exit and into the darkness. There was something vaguely familiar about the clumsy way it was moving, but Emma had no time to figure out what it was. Instead, she sucked in just enough sickly sweet air to fill her lungs. She dropped her hand from her mouth and shouted, “Shoot it, Owen!”

  And it was that word, not consciously chosen—“it”—that told her what she truly felt. Whatever they were looking at, she was sure it was no longer Obed Macy.

  But then something happened to cast that gut-level conviction into doubt.

  Beside her, Owen raised his gun. His shaking hand rose to the level of the thing’s face.

  The creature stopped cold. Its unblinking eyes opened wider, staring at the pistol. She recognized the expression immediately because she’d seen it just seconds earlier, albeit on a different face. It was fear mixed with recognition. Fear of the gun … Obed? she thought. Is he still in there?

  The gun was loaded, cocked, and leveled. The tug of Owen’s finger was all that remained.

  Emma watched as the creature, or Obed, or—she wasn’t even sure anymore, but she watched as their attacker began to slowly shamble backward. The heavy feet dragged as the other four limbs twitched and swayed.

  “It moves like old Wrickitts,” said Aaron in a horrified whisper.

  Yes, that’s it, she thought. That’s what is familiar. But she wasn’t the only one who seemed to recognize the name.

  No sooner was it uttered than the creature ceased its retreat. Its eyes narrowed, its lips flattened, and it bared its boy’s teeth as it hissed once again. It lurched forward, faster this time.

  Emma heard a small, crisp click from directly beside her head as Owen pulled the trigger.

  Instantly, her world lit up with a fiery light and filled with a deafening bang. She reeled away too late. Stunned by the explosion so close to her head, she could do little more than stumble blindly back from the thing’s advance.

  She felt something clamp down on her shoulder and pushed it away in horror. But it was no slime-sheathed claw. It was a warm hand. She blinked her eyes open, and behind the swirling stars she saw Owen.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “At least, I think so.”

  She stood up, her eyes searching the passageway. She saw nothing under the light that streamed in from the grating, and nothing in the dark expanse directly behind that.

  “Did you hit him?” she said.

  “Possibly,” said Owen, gazing at the same empty stretch. “But he has not fallen.”

  “There is no time for discussion,” said Thacher. “We cannot linger down here.”

  Owen nodded, but as Henry tried to rush past him, he stuck out an arm and stopped him cold. Henry looked over, not comprehending, the still-warm barrel of the pistol pressed sideways against his chest, barring his way.

  “Pick up the food,” said Emma, explaining it to him. She gazed into the murky dim beyond the little patch of light. “We are no longer alone upon this ship, and we must take everything we can.”

  They carried their heavy loads up the sloping ladder and dropped them on the deck. Owen emerged, last in line, still pointing the now-empty pistol down into the darkness. Had he forgotten he’d already fired his shot, wondered Emma, or was he hoping that Obed had forgotten how to count to one somewhere along the way to becoming a monster?

  “What is it?” called Maria, from her post. “What did you see?”

  “A beast!” Aaron answered.

  “The walking remains of Obed Macy!” added Thacher.

  “Nothing good,” concluded Owen.

  Henry said nothing, and Emma could see his mind still working, still chewing away at the bizarre sight. What has he seen? she wondered. Does he alone know? She turned to her sister and shook her head, her message somewhere between “I have no idea” and “You don’t want to know.”

  Then she swung around to help batten down the hatch. As soon as the cover was on, they loaded it up with any heavy object within reach. Not just rope this time, but also the sturdy wooden blocks that those ropes slid through and other bits of equipment. For a moment, Emma wondered if they could drag one of the anchors over. She stared up at the heavy cables holding them to the ship, and that’s when she saw the forward hatch.

  “Save some of the ballast,” she said, pointing at it.

  They loaded that one down too. After they planted an old pot of dried tar on top, Aaron grabbed the ship’s cat and plopped her down amid the clutter. “Don’t let anything up, Daffy!” he instructed.

  Daffodil hissed up at him and took off at a run for the captain’s cabin.

  “We’ll have to guard it ourselves,” said Owen. “That one doesn’t have the claws for it.” He paused, remembering what they’d just seen. “We’d need a lion.”

  He looked down at his pistol and followed the cat into the cabin to reload.

  Thacher followed a few steps behind. At first, Emma didn’t think much of it, but then it occurred to her where he might be going. She fell in line a few paces back.

  Thacher took the three little steps up to the quarterdeck briskly, and a few moments later, Emma did the same, her bare feet cat-quiet on the well-worn wood. Just a few days earlier it would have been unthinkable for a ship’s boy—much less a ship’s girl—to set foot on this rarefied terrain without permission. Now they did it with barely a second thought.

  Thacher stopped short alongside the wheel. Emma nodded grimly behind him. She’d been right.

  “I’ll take over,” Thacher told Maria. “Your trick’s up
by now.”

  Maria shifted her gaze from the ocean ahead to the boy beside her. Then she looked over his shoulder at her sister. Thacher followed her gaze and turned. He jumped slightly, his nerves worn as thin as everyone else’s. “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “It’s not your turn,” said Emma flatly. “You’re not even on the same watch.”

  “What’s it to you?” he said, already turning away and stepping back toward the wheel. “Some time at the helm will calm my nerves is all.”

  But is that all? Emma wondered.

  Thacher put a hand on the wheel, grabbing one of the spokes and swinging around by it. He seemed willing to shoulder Maria out of the way, but before he could, she released the wheel and stepped aside.

  “Fine with me,” she said. Looking straight into Emma’s eyes she added, “We need to talk anyway. I want to know what happened down there—I heard the gunshot.”

  Emma took one more look at Thacher, standing tall and looking diligent enough at the wheel. Then she looked back at her sister. “Fine,” she said. “But you will not like it.”

  The sisters turned and headed forward, leaning in and talking low. Emma struggled to find the words—in English, Spanish, or anything else that might spring to mind—to describe the horror she’d seen beneath that grating. Maria refused to believe what she had heard, interrupting with “Are you sure?” and “No!” and “It is very hard to see clearly down there.”

  As they descended from the quarterdeck, the cabin door slapped open behind them and the shouting started. “What are you doing?” bellowed Owen. “Have you lost your senses?”

  “On the contrary,” Thacher called back, “I have found them.”

  Emma glanced down at his hands and saw them pulling hard to the left. A moment later, the big ship answered, pitching over to its side as its course changed. That rat! she thought. She knew he’d been up to something.

  Owen stepped forward but Thacher refused to even look in his direction. He was steering hard left: straight toward the nearest land, straight toward Central America. She knew, because she had briefly considered doing the same thing.

  “I am taking her straight to shore,” yelled Thacher. “I care not where!”

  “You will not!” growled Owen.

  Suddenly, the two boys were side by side, and there were four hands on the wheel instead of two.

  “Let him do it!” called Aaron.

  She turned to see the others gathered beside her on the lip of the quarterdeck, watching the wrestling match for control of the wheel. Emma’s eyes flicked down toward the reloaded pistol, stuck into Owen’s belt. It was all so familiar: the anger and shouting and the heavy tang of possible violence. A word floated into her mind, but she refused to say it, or even think it.

  Then another thought occurred to her. She looked up into the canvas. The wind was stronger now. She spun and looked up toward the bowsprit. “The sails!” she shouted.

  A sailing ship was guided as much with its sails as its wheel. You couldn’t just make hard turns willy-nilly, without making the corresponding changes to the sails. She searched the eyes of those around her. Who would help her? She looked back toward the wheel, her eyes pleading for some sort of order.

  What she saw there calmed her nerves, at least for a moment. Bigger and stronger, Owen simply overpowered Thacher for control of the wheel. Once the smaller boy’s hands were free of the spokes, Owen shouldered him aside. Thacher hesitated and then stepped clear.

  The tension faded and Emma exhaled. It had been a mutinous moment, or nearly so, but it had passed. Thacher had no stomach for a losing battle.

  Slowly and steadily, with his eyes on the horizon, Owen began to steer the ship back to starboard. “The sails are in order,” he said. “Though we won’t be needing those royals in this wind.”

  He peeled his eyes from the sails and looked down at the assembled crew. “We have seen a horrible thing this day, but it either ran from this gun or fell from its blast. Perhaps it lies dead already.”

  It, thought Emma. If I had pulled that trigger, I wouldn’t say his name either. She remembered the scene and tried to reconcile Owen’s boastful tone now with his shaking hand then.

  “Either way,” he continued, “I will have no more talk of this ridiculous business. The nearest port?” He repeated the phrase, spitting it out with disdain: “The nearest port? Do you have any idea where we are in the world?”

  He stared at Aaron and then shot a look back at Thacher. “These are wild ports, full of slavers and pirates. Wild ports, and foreign. Six children alone? The ship would be sold out from under us in a moment. And then we would be sold, in turn. Sold, or worse.”

  And here his eyes found Emma and her sister. It was a fierce look, and she felt a shudder run through her. He opened his mouth as if to say something more. Emma feared what it might be. What dire threat or prediction? Instead, Owen closed his mouth and shook his head.

  “What of the government of, well, of wherever it is we land?” said Henry, his voice a peep.

  Owen seemed not to hear him, or at least did not acknowledge him. Emma answered instead. “Who do you think would take the ship?”

  Henry gazed back at her, shocked. For a moment she envied him. How soft had his upbringing been that he had no idea how the world worked out here, in the wide seas beyond New York or Boston or wherever this frail boy had been hatched.

  But it was a harmless question, and as Henry stood beside her, still considering the implications of her words, she leaned in to ask him one with a bit more bite.

  “You know what that was down there, don’t you?” she said into the whipping wind. “I saw it … in your eyes.”

  Henry looked over at her, and she could see now that those same eyes were watering. She hoped it was from the stiff salt breeze.

  He met her gaze. “It was …” he began, before pausing to find the right word. And despite his strange frailty—or maybe because of it—she had no doubt he would choose the right one. “It was a transformation,” he said.

  She nodded. The word was almost the same in Spanish: transformación.

  He continued. “Two separate species are somehow—”

  “Somehow what?” interrupted Maria. “What are you two talking about?” She was leaning in and whispering too. Secrets, Emma knew, were among her sister’s favorite things. Even if she’s not so great at keeping them.

  “Stow that grub!” Owen shouted up from the wheel, shattering the quiet shared moment. “We’ve rough seas ahead, and we don’t want to lose any of it overboard.”

  The sky was darkening behind the ship, and the wind was picking up again. Whatever was coming, it would be no passing squall this time.

  “We’ll need to take in some sail,” Emma called back as the first drops of rain began to fall. She heard them on the deck and felt them in her matted hair.

  Owen, Thacher, and the rest of the crew turned to look at the ominous sky, each one of them with a weather eye, trying to gauge how much time they had before the storm struck. There was nothing like foul weather to bring a crew together.

  As they gazed skyward, a huge gust of wind struck the ship from the southeast, once again well in advance of the looming clouds. The sails stretched fore and aft, the timber groaned, and the ship was knocked nearly on its side.

  “It crept up on us!” called Aaron. “Sneaky devil!”

  Emma fell to one knee to keep her balance. Henry, with the weakest sea legs, hit the deck beside her, rolling like a tumbleweed toward the rail. She wondered, with that strange dreaminess that sometimes accompanies mortal danger, if that was the last she would see of him.

  For in a world with monsters and slavers, a world where no port was truly safe, there was still no quicker or surer death than that offered by foul weather at sea.

  The gust had come from out of a blue sky and vanished into a graying one. As the wind relented, the ship righted herself. But as it rolled back to something like level, the waves slapping against h
er hull were already growing.

  “It’s coming up fast!” Owen called from the wheel. “We can ride its edge, stay ahead of it!”

  And for a while, it worked. The wind increased steadily, with only occasional gusts, and none like the sudden wallop that had nearly swamped them. Emma held on tight to the rail and took in the state of things. The hatches were battened down and then some, and they’d covered the gratings. The mainmast was missing its big mainsail, but the trysail was puffed out aft and the foremast was wearing plenty of canvas. The sailcloth was quickly soaked, turning a darker gray as the sky soured above them and the rain began to pore down in buckets. But wet sails hauled wind well, and if nothing else cracked or split, she thought they might just be able to stay ahead of the worst of it until the storm blew itself out or passed them by.

  “We’re going to make it!” she shouted through the whistling wind to her sister, just feet away. She smiled crazily at the simple thought of survival.

  But her sister was not smiling back. She was looking straight ahead.

  Emma whipped her head around. “Oh no,” she murmured, her words eaten alive by the wind.

  What she saw was the big ship sliding down the back of a long swell. “Hold on!” she yelled, and not just to her sister this time.

  The bow slammed hard into the waiting sea, punching through like a spoon into soup. Emma felt her head whipped forward. A moment later, a wave of seawater flooded across the deck as the ship rose back up on the face of the next swell. But it didn’t rise as high as it had before, and when it slid down the back of it, it dove even deeper. Emma watched in both horror and recognition as the long bowsprit at the front of the boat harpooned the water.

  As the boat rose again, it brought with it a heavy load of seawater that rolled down the deck in a great frothy wave.

  And again the boat rose up only to be driven down.

  And again.

  And again.

  And each time, it rose up less and was driven down more.