by Various
“Hmm,” the doctor said thoughtfully, stroking his chin. “Invisibility. I had not thought of that.” He nodded at a stack of venerable tomes tottering precariously upon the swaying floor. “Pray, fetch me Ambrosius’s Chronicles of Realms Unseen. That gilt-edged volume there,” he added, noting Robin’s blank expression.
She located the desired text, which felt strangely cold and slimy to the touch, like an algae-covered rock at low tide. Intending to hand it over to Dr. Pratt forthwith, she took one step toward the desk when, without warning, a numbing shock flowed up her arms, from her fingertips to her shoulders, causing her to drop the unhallowed book as though it were ablaze.
“What is it?” Dr. Pratt asked, springing from his seat so abruptly that the chair toppled over behind him. His bushy black brows lifted in alarm. “Are you unwell?”
Robin heard his anxious inquiries, yet her attention was elsewhere. As the feeling returned to her arms, nigh as swiftly as it had departed, she stared in wide-eyed amazement at the book upon the floor, which had fallen open to reveal two of its myriad pages. “Shiver my soul!”
She could not read any of the words inscribed upon the pages. Why, even the very alphabet of which the writing was composed bore no resemblance to any language she had ever encountered before, making the ornate and inscrutable hieroglyphics of the Far East look like a child’s ABCs.
But there was no mistaking the grotesque illustration, engraved with exacting if abominable precision, that accompanied the indecipherable scribblings: a tentacled monstrosity with eyes the color of rubies, reigning atop a throne of skulls. “I know this ugly devil!” she blurted loudly. “There was a golden effigy of the very same creature stowed in the hold of the El Dorado, with the rest of the treasure!”
“Good Lord!” the doctor gasped. “Are you certain?”
“As ever I was!” This be no chance event, she realized; Providence, in its wisdom, sometimes gifted slayers with prophetic dreams and hints of knowledge beyond their ken. She felt very clearly the hand of fate at work here.
Gently, taking care not to lose their place, Dr. Pratt lifted the supine volume from the floor and laid it upon the desktop. A beam of radiant sunlight, entering the cabin through a glass porthole, fell upon the exposed pages, permitting her and the doctor to behold the telltale portrait in all its repugnant detail.
Upon closer inspection, Robin saw that the squidlike beast was not alone. Tiny figures squirmed within the coils of the monster, while others fell helplessly into the creature’s gaping beak, their paltry arms and legs extended in all directions. With a start, Robin realized that the minuscule figures, so small and insignificant with respect to the many-armed colossus, represented grown men and women.
Mere symbolism, she wondered, or a portrait drawn from an all too hideous reality? Robin suddenly recalled wild stories she’d heard, in seaports all around the globe, about a mythical sea monster called a kraken. . . .
“What became of this golden idol you spoke of?” Dr. Pratt inquired, urgency coloring his voice. His careworn visage seemed to age visibly as he contemplated the dreadful illustration. “Where is it now?”
“I cannot say for certain,” she admitted. There had been so much gold aboard the Spanish treasure ship, so many priceless baubles. “But I’ll wager you a hundred guineas that it spent last night in the hull of this very vessel!”
“Yes,” Dr. Pratt agreed, his mind speeding in concert with her own. “It must have been brought aboard the schooner during the initial division of the spoils.” His gaze dropped to the floor, as though to peer through the solid wooden planks. “But is it still below? That scoundrel Newgate claimed most of the treasure for himself.”
Robin tried to remember if the pagan idol had been among the booty returned to the El Dorado before they parted company with Newgate and the rest, but her foggy recollections were interrupted by the unexpected sound of a hysterical woman crying out in mortal terror.
“Muchas bocas!” Carmelita Aponte shrieked, staring with thunderstruck eyes at the open book. Intent upon the revelatory pages, neither Robin nor Dr. Pratt had observed Carmelita bestir herself from sleep, then rise from the portside berth to approach them. Now the sole survivor of the El Dorado’s original complement, her ashen face contorted in abject fear, pointed at the finely rendered kraken and its guppy-size victims. “Muchas bocas! Tantas bocas!”
* * *
“Faster! Faster, by God!”
Racing the setting sun, Robin stood atop the forecastle, urging her crew and her ship to greater speed. Every square inch of sail had been unfurled and Neptune’s Lady was virtually flying atop the waves, but Robin had not yet caught sight of the El Dorado’s lofty masts. Glancing to the west, she winced as she watched the tropical sun plunge toward the horizon, trailing blood-red streamers across the twilight sky.
A rapid inventory of the schooner’s hold had yielded no sign of the blasphemous idol, suggesting that the accursed sculpture once more resided upon the captured galleon. Consequently Robin had immediately turned Neptune’s Lady around and set out in search of the other ship. Although the faithlessness of the mutineers still galled her soul, she knew she had no choice but to try to save Newgate and the others from the hellish fate in store for them. She was, after all, the Slayer.
A briny spray splashed against her face as she peered out over the prow. The schooner’s tapered bowsprit stabbed at the cresting swells ahead of them, in rhythm with the persistent susurrus of the blue-green waters breaking against the stem. A strong northeast wind blew at cross purposes to their course, forcing them to tack back and forth in order to make any headway against the opposing gusts. Robin ground her teeth in frustration and clutched her spyglass so tightly that her powerful fingers indented the scope’s metal casing.
“Step lively, ye sea dogs!” she demanded, even though the schooner had to be making ten knots at the very least. Dr. Pratt held tightly to the forecastle rail behind her, his pale lips pinched together. “Trim ’em closer, by God!”
The sun sank like an anchor beneath the Caribbean, casting everything above the seas into darkness. Last night’s gravid clouds veiled the moon and stars once more, giving Robin not a jot of light to sail by. “You did your very best, Robin,” Dr. Pratt offered by way of meager consolation. “Those rogues brought their doom upon themselves through their own base avarice and duplicity.”
“Petty sins,” Robin opined, unwilling to accept such solace. A pirate captain, she knew, was hardly one to pass judgment over her fellow mortals. “Undeservin’ of so loathsome a fate.”
As though unwittingly conjured by her doleful pronouncement, the screams of dying men erupted from the night, reaching the schooner from somewhere across the waves. Robin peered anxiously through the spyglass, but distance and darkness conspired to hide the source of the screams from her view.
That the horrible shrieking came from the El Dorado she had no doubt. “No, damn my soul!” Robin cursed. “Not again!” From the din of the strident cries, she judged that the besieged galleon could be only minutes away at top speed. “Helmsman!” she called out to faithful Jeremiah Pyle. “Set course for those poor, tormented souls!”
Although many a crewman blanched at the prospect of drawing nearer to the genesis of that fearful cacophony, they hastened to obey Robin’s shouted commands. The elements, alas, were not so obliging, as, just at this most crucial juncture, the wind abruptly failed, causing the sails to sag lifelessly from the gaffs and Neptune’s Lady to slow to a halt.
“No!” Robin stared at the listless sheets in disbelief; it was as though fate itself were intent on preventing her from coming to the rescue of the imperiled buccaneers. “Confound it!” she yelled. Hopelessly becalmed, the schooner bobbed upon rolling swell; more than a few of the men looked distinctly relieved to have been so stalled in their progress toward the fearful wailing.
But Robin refused to surrender. If nature herself would not be willing to provide the wind required, then she would just have manufa
cture one herself. “Get to your magicks, doctor!” she instructed her watcher, who hurriedly scrambled aft toward his library. Meanwhile Robin resorted to the time-honored tradition of the sea, pursing her lips to whistle loudly for a wind, pausing only to command all in earshot to do the same. “Whistle!” she ordered vehemently. “Whistle as though yer scurvy lives depended on it!”
Hesitantly at first, then with increasing enthusiasm, the staunch buccaneers whistled at will, producing a discordant babel of sharp toots and trills. The raucous whistling competed bizarrely with the agonized shrieks issuing from the unseen galleon. “Aye, that’s it! That’s a proper racket!” Robin encouraged her men. “Keep on warblin’!”
Invoking another hallowed superstition, she drew a dagger from her belt and drove it into the foremast, indicating the direction of the wind she sought. Even as she did so, Dr. Pratt came running forward, gripping a dilapidated, leatherbound volume. Robin was surprised to see Carmelita Aponte emerge from the stern cabin as well, trailing nervously behind the doctor like a dinghy cruising in a flagship’s wake.
“Unto Eurus, scion of Astraea and Eos,” Pratt recited sonorously, reading aloud from the mystical tome. “Unto Ehecatl, Vayu, Itzamna, and Aeolus; I beseech thee, Lords of the Air, grant us the blessing of thy divine and beneficent exhalations.” Bracing his back against the foremast, facing the bow, he raised his right hand in supplication. “Breathe, breathe, exhalare!”
Was it the pirates’ whistling or Dr. Pratt’s more arcane incantation that did the trick? Robin neither knew nor cared as, with a resounding crack, the flaccid sails billowed outward and Neptune’s Lady charged forward like a cannon shot, so swiftly that Robin had to grab on to a standing line to steady herself. Aye! she exulted triumphantly. This be more like it!
Then those same powerful gusts blew the overhanging clouds away from the moon. A silvery lunar radiance fell upon the nocturnal sea, revealing at last the unspeakable horror Robin had already envisioned.
The El Dorado, nearly half a league away, was under attack by an immense sea monster identical to the one depicted in that gruesome illustration. Monstrous tentacles, the size of soaring masts, rose from the turbulent white froth surrounding the galleon. Black as ebony and glistening wetly, the mammoth limbs snatched the panicked mutineers off the towering upper decks of the besieged treasure ship, just as they must have silently plucked last night’s victims from the more modest environs of the schooner.
But those furtive abductions had clearly only whetted the kraken’s voracious appetite, which now was aroused to gargantuan proportions. Heavy tarpaulins were torn asunder and battened hatches thrown carelessly open as the questing tentacles, endowed with grasping palps at their tips, probed below decks in pursuit of fresh human meat. Shuddering at the purgatorial tableau before her bulging eyes, Robin well imagined how an equally ravenous assault must have emptied the galleon of its previous crew, save for the captain lashed to the whipstaff and the terrified senorita cowering down in the hold, inside the closed teak casket.
For certain, it’s the fault of that damnable idol, she realized angrily. The cursed statue surely acted as a beacon to its demonic inspiration, luring the kraken up from the dark, abysmal depths. I should have hurled that ugly bit of ballast over the side the minute I laid eyes on it!
Through the magnifying lens of the spyglass, Robin watched, aghast, as her former shipmates fought desperately and futilely against the invading tentacles. Slashing blades and smoking pistols, along with frantically-wielded axes and marlinespikes, inflicted little damage on the enormous limbs, whose leathery hide appeared all but impervious to harm. Robin saw a merciless tentacle wrap like a boa constrictor around the writhing form of George Newgate. Ringlike suckers the size of doubloons, abundantly arrayed upon the underside of the relentless tentacles, affixed themselves to Newgate’s bare throat and chest; despite his perfidy, Robin’s eyes widened in dismay as she watched the traitorous quartermaster’s lifeblood drain out of him, leaving him as pale and lifeless as the late Capitan Aponte. Robin instantly recalled the puckered stigmata upon the dead Spaniard’s flesh, and an icy shiver of comprehension ran down her spine. Not even Newgate, she thought ruefully, deserved so deplorable an end.
A heartbeat later the hungry tentacle dragged the bearded man’s bloodless carcass beneath the roiling foam, to be devoured, no doubt, by the kraken’s crushing beak.
Her face white as well, Robin mutely passed the spyglass over to Dr. Pratt so that her watcher might also comprehend the full malignancy of the hell-beast assailing the galleon. A sharp intake of breath, followed by a whispered “Good Lord,” announced that he, too, had witnessed the thirsty suckers at work.
“Vampyroteuthis infernalis,” he identified the beast, slowly lowering the spyglass. “The vampire squid from hell.” He shook his aged head in awful wonder. “But I never dreamed it could grow so large!”
“Muchas bocas,” Carmelita Aponte confirmed. Hugging tightly to the sturdy trunk of the foremast, she nodded gravely in recognition of the multiple-limbed monstrosity that had sucked the life from her father and his crew. Robin knew now the nature of the “many mouths” that haunted the young woman’s memory.
An occult wind carried them quickly toward the kraken’s appalling feast. Within minutes Robin and the others no longer needed the telescope to behold the atrocity taking place upon the galleon. Desperate to escape the insatiable tentacles, the frenzied mutineers took to the rigging, climbing higher and higher in a last-ditch bid to evade the horrid death that had already claimed their shipmates.
But the gluttonous beast would not be cheated of its prey. Wrapping two of its mighty arms around the El Dorado’s bow, it pulled itself up onto the ship’s prow so that its remaining tentacles could reach all the way to the tops of the masts. Clinging to the galleon’s prow like a grotesque, fleshy figurehead, the kraken’s entire body was now exposed, granting Robin a fuller look at the monster.
At least thirty feet long, the giant squid’s bulging mantle was a mass of black, palpating meat and muscle, like the beating heart of some even more colossal archdevil. Seen in profile, as Neptune’s Lady approached at a ninety-degree angle to the galleon’s starboard side, the kraken’s lurid red eye was the size of a seawitch’s crystal ball. Its chitinous beak clacked hungrily as it chawed down upon the blood-drained corpses of the slain pirates. Robin counted ten tentacles in all, including the two that now held the beast glued to the prow. The ponderous weight of the monster was such that the bow of the mountainous galleon dipped into the sea, raising the stern, along with the rudder, many yards above the foaming brine. Dislodged seamen spilled from the poop and quarterdecks as the forward tilt of the treasure ship catapulted them into the air, to land clumsily upon the rigging or timber planks below.
A burly freebooter, Francois Leveau by name, repeatedly jabbed a wooden marlinespike at the sinuous tentacle now lifting him from the beakhead of the askew galleon. But his fear-crazed efforts were in vain; the vicious prong did little more than scratch the kraken’s tough and slippery hide. Seconds later his gray desiccated body joined the others disappearing down the squid’s yawning maw.
As Neptune Lady’s closed on the horrific scene, coming within a thousand yards of the galleon’s bow, Robin contemplated her own trusty cutlass, which struck her as starkly inadequate against so gigantic a behemoth. She briefly considered bringing the schooner’s cannons to bear, but quickly discarded the notion. The havoc inflicted by a blazing barrage of round-shot would most likely devastate the surviving buccaneers more than the unstoppable kraken.
What then was she to do? Robin had slain many a leech, but never one so much larger than herself. I can’t just stab a stake through its filthy heart, she lamented silently.
Or can I?
Inspiration struck, and, cutlass in hand, she crawled out onto the bowsprit, gripping the angled wooden spar between her knees. Spume splashed against her, drenching her clothes, and splinters of pine flew like sparks as she hacked away at th
e tip of the bowsprit, sharpening it to a jagged point.
The El Dorado, held tight in the kraken’s embrace, loomed before her, so near that Robin could smell the putrid stench of the sea monster, which reeked like heap a of rotting fish left too long in the sun. Beneath her, only a few yards back, the Lady’s undinal figurehead looked on impassively, offering Robin a measure of sisterly support.
“Dead ahead!” she called out over the roar of the sea. Finished at the spar’s tip, she slid back down the bowsprit onto the forecastle. “Aim this goddamned ship right through that devil’s heart!”
Pyle did not falter at the tiller. Galloping over the waves, her close-hauled sails pinched tightly to the wind, Neptune’s Lady slammed into the kraken, driving the sharpened bowsprit into the vampire squid like the world’s largest wooden stake!
A crimson geyser gushed from the impaled beast, the gory Vesuvius adding to the salt-spray dousing Robin’s face and garments. Letting go of the El Dorado, the kraken writhed in agony, its tentacles flailing wildly. The schooner tilted forward as the weight of the creature pulled the prow down. Robin held her breath, then exhaled in relief as the kraken slid off the pointed spar, back into the brine. Before her grateful eyes, the wounded monster disappeared beneath the foam, leaving a thick cloud of stolen blood behind.
Can it be? she wondered. Did I truly kill it? The creature had surely seemed mortally injured, but how could she be sure?
Leaning over the main rail, she peered into the deep . . . just as the tip of a vengeful tentacle burst from the bloody froth and wrapped itself around Robin’s right forearm. Greedy suckers bit into her flesh, drawing out her blood even through the sleeves of her soaking coat and shirt.
The clammy palp tugged on her with inhuman vigor, threatening to yank her over the rail and into the sea. Grunting in pain, Robin clung to the gunwale with her free hand. “Help me!” she cried out. “I can’t hold on!”
Heedlessly dropping the valuable spellbook onto the swaying deck, Dr. Pratt scrambled to his slayer’s aid. His bony fingers pried at the stubborn tentacle coiled around Robin’s arm, but he could not extricate the imprisoned limb from the kraken’s grasp. “Dear God, it’s too strong!” he gasped.