The Dead Men Stood Together

by Chris Priestley

  It pulled alongside. A ghastly limelight now lit up the wreck and showed the . . . I was going to say ‘crew’, yet that word could not rightly be used for what we saw.

  The sight of a crew made up of the drowned would have been a horror, of course, but that ship – the Black Ship – only sought out their own kind as crewmates, and we had not drowned.

  There were only two figures visible on the ship and neither of them had ever been a sailor. This craft was wondrous strange, yet these two hellish characters made it appear the most ordinary sight in the world.

  My lifeblood seemed to congeal in my veins. My mind was already at breaking point, unable to cope with the horrors that each new moment presented to it. Would this be one step too far? I hoped it would. I hoped my mind would snap and I’d no longer know truth from lie – that I’d fall into some happy state of oblivion, like that of the pilot’s son.

  Crouched at the prow of the ship, was a woman dressed in a filthy shift that had once perhaps been fine but was now ragged and damp, green with mould in places, and clung to her pallid skin here and there.

  And her skin was so white. No – not white exactly, more that queasy pale yellow and blue-white of fat on the meat hanging from the butcher’s hook. The lifeless pallor was made even more striking by the glistening redness of her ruby lips and the golden tresses that tumbled around her face.

  Her eyes were large and limpid, like those of a fish brought up from the far dark and dismal ocean depths. They glinted and flickered left and right and the ghostly green light with them. They were like those of an animal that has known only night and spent each daylight hour hidden and cloaked in shadow.

  She looked more than a little crazed. Her red lips shone like beads of blood on a pinprick and parted to show small, perfect teeth. The tip of her tongue appeared between them as she clapped her thin white hands rapidly together.

  She was so strange a creature that she had entirely distracted my attention from the figure who sat beside her. But now he leaned forward, holding a cup, and as he did so, every one of us aboard our ship instinctively backed away to the same degree. This man – no, I cannot say ‘man’ – this thing in human form was male, it’s true, but like some reanimated corpse.

  His face was more skull than anything else: what skin was left was stretched tightly like old leather, its taut surface frayed and holed in places, revealing darkened bone and gristle.

  If he had eyes, I could not see them, and I was glad of it. He wore a hooded cloak that added further shadow to the night’s darkness and made it difficult to see any features other than those I have already described and this robe swaddled his body, as ragged as his face, leaving horrible glimpses of mummified flesh and dark, stained bones.

  I knew who he was. We all did. King Death had come for us at last, as he must come for all men. Who the woman might be was less clear. She was not Life, that was all too apparent. She was not anything good, I felt sure of that.

  Death leaned forward, his tattered robes moving with him. He held a pewter cup in his right hand and the bones of his wrist were hideously exposed as he rattled the contents and poured the dice on the deck.

  It was too dark, even with the glowlight, to see the numbers on the dice, but it was apparent from the way he shook his head and sat back heavily that the score was not a good one.

  The female creature took the cup from his hands with a weird little yelp and grinned, her teeth showing pale green between the poppy-red lips. She picked up the dice and put them in the cup, giving it a kiss and looking at us with bulging eyes.

  She gave the cup a sudden shake and the noise it made was painful to hear in that silence. I felt it in my brain and in my gut, as if my own teeth rattled in my skull. She stretched out her arm, turned her wrist and out tumbled the two bone dice.

  She stared at them in wonder, and turned to her mate in triumph, whilst he shook his head again and clenched his bony fists.

  ‘The game is done!’ cried the woman. ‘I’ve won! I’ve won!’

  Then she whistled three times, sharp and harsh, into the night of a million stars strewn above our heads. Death sank back, disappointed, into the shadows and the woman turned to us – and with such a horrible expression of victory and possession that I wondered if we would not have been better off had Death won.

  The ghastly woman looked straight at my uncle and smiled. It was such a dreadful smile; I wished that I could have died so that I might never have seen it. She walked slowly to the side of her ship and never once took her eyes from my uncle.

  Then, with a lizard-like agility, she clambered up the side of our ship and stood upon the deck. Still she stared at my uncle. And we all followed her gaze as she walked towards him.

  Everyone understood that he had brought this upon us. This creature clearly knew it and we knew it. Tears welled in my eyes – of shame and anger and a childish desire to wake from this nightmare and find myself in my mother’s arms. But I did not wake.

  The woman slowly trod the deck, her feet scarcely making a sound, and all was silent in the world. Her movements were so slow and floating that it was as though she were walking beneath the waves and it seemed to take an eternity for her to stand before my uncle.

  Then she made a high-pitched trill and lunged forward, kissing him on the lips. He reeled back, as the creature giggled and clapped her hands like a little girl. It was her most horrible performance yet.

  I know not why, but as he backed away from her, my uncle cast a swift glance at me – and the woman saw it. With mounting terror I watched her walk towards me, her head cocked to one side, her grinning lips shimmering.

  I backed away as far as I could but soon there was nowhere else to go. I would gladly have taken my chances with the slime-things in the sea – anywhere would have been better than to stay with her – but she held me in a fierce grip with her snake-like stare.

  She came close – closer than I thought my wits could bear. I saw my fear-filled face reflected in the pools of her huge eyes that shone with an unnatural light.

  She did not touch me. She seemed only to study me, as though I was an object of especial fascination to her. But only for a moment. For quite suddenly she clucked her tongue and turned and walked away to climb back into her own craft.

  One by one, without a cry or a groan, and with that vile creature smiling on, each of the crew fell down, and I along with them. We fell where we’d stood, thudding to the deck, straddled across each other’s sun-burned and wasted bodies.

  I fell in such a way that I looked back towards my uncle. He alone of us stood upright, lit from below by the green glow all about the ship. He staggered back until he hit the capstan, staring in disbelief.

  Then the souls of each of my fellow mariners began to rise like smoke from the fallen bodies. They rose and began to swirl about my uncle like a tornado and then all at once they hurtled upwards with a great whooshing noise and disappeared into the night sky. Every single soul of the fallen men had left their lifeless bodies.

  Every single soul save mine.

  PART THE FOURTH

  XXIII

  That’s right. I fell down with all the others. I died along with them. Believe it. Why would I lie? I died. Make no mistake.

  I felt the warm life leave me and I felt my heart turn cold at its flight. I dropped down to the deck and seemed to fall through it, through the hold and through the hull, through the cold waters beneath, to a dismal abyss below.

  I sank down through this darkness until I eventually settled on the seabed – though I could see through the gloom that it was featureless. There were no stones or rocks or weed or fish. It was more like the floor of some great warehouse.

  The only light was a narrow beam that came from high above. It hit the floor some way away from where I stood and I slowly walked towards it.

  It seemed to take an age to reach that small patch of bright floor and when I stood beside it I looked up, trying to follow the beam’s path, but it disappeared into the murk
high above.

  Looking up became a dizzying business, because the darkness was so featureless all about that I suddenly had the sensation of looking down and following a light that was shining up from the depths of some deep chasm below.

  I looked back at the patch of the ocean floor illuminated by the beam and as I did so I stepped into its light. In that instant, I was sucked upwards at great speed and found myself once more on the deck of the ship.

  I was left emptier and darker, like a deserted house. The blood no longer surged in my veins, my lungs no longer filled with air. Only my mind seemed to remain in my control.

  My soul did not flee like the others. It stayed within my lifeless body but it was as if it had been bound and gagged and loaded down with heavy weights.

  I had never been aware of my soul before. I gave no thought to such things. But now I felt a terrible sorrow for the loss of its freedom and health and a great fear came over me.

  My shipmates lay as empty shells – and they were lucky. They were unaware. Their true selves had gone and only the appearance of them remained. But I would see what happened next.

  Each of us had fallen with eyes wide open, frozen in the cursed look we had given my uncle as we fell. What a sight that was! He stood there among us, like a murderer, wide-eyed and awe-struck, and a hundred pairs of lifeless eyes stared back at him in the gloom.

  I was somehow sure that all those eyes were unseeing apart from mine, though they no doubt bored into his soul all the same. My uncle looked at me just once and shook his head. He had no idea that I was looking back – and I could give him no sign that I was.

  The moon rose above us and the terrible scene was lit by its pale light. It looked like a massacre had taken place or we were the casualties in some great sea battle, but our deaths would be unnoticed by the world. No poems would mark our falling.

  The ship would surely rot away in time and we would all be taken down into the depths of the ocean to be gnawed at by crabs and starfish. Would I be conscious? Would I feel their rasping mouths attack my flesh?

  The Death Ship moved slowly off. I saw its ragged sails slip out of view, like the passage of a flock of bats. It made no sound as it left, like a dark cloud passing over the night sky.

  King Death sailed away and took his comrade with him. I could still hear her chirruping triumphantly and the sound of it cut into me like needles.

  She sailed away, until the sound of her gloating mingled with the sound of the sea and she was finally gone.

  But if she had won, then why had we all died? Was this woman another Death? And why, if dead, could I still think to ask this question? I felt sure this strange limbo state was mine alone and sure too that it had something to do with the special interest that creature took in me before she left. She seemed to sense the link to my uncle and so my soul did not ascend with those of my crewmates.

  She must have been some ghastly not-quite-death – some horrible merging of two states: a Life-in-Death. Was this to be my new fate? To live in death but not live? To feel the grip of Death: to know its grip and yet not have its sweet release – to feel its hold forever?

  My uncle stood, his mouth twitching. He seemed to be in a daze. He stared after the retreating ship, his face cold and pale in the moonlight. His mind struggled, like mine did, to cope with the strangeness of this new world we found ourselves in.

  And then he turned to us, his shipmates. There we lay, dead – all dead – and all our eyes turned as one to look at him. He put his hands to his face and staggered away.

  But when he looked away from us, all he could see was the slimy, writhing sea and the horror of that sight meant he walked back to the centre of the deck and, in desperation, closed his eyes.

  It did him no good. He could close his eyes but he knew we were still there, each accusing eye glistening in the moon glow. Why, even if he had blinded himself with a red hot poker, the spectacle we made would only have burned itself more deeply into his afflicted mind.

  XXIV

  For days and days, we lay like that. It was as if the moment that follows death had been endlessly unravelled and spun out into an eternity.

  It was the unearthly stillness that followed a hammer striking an anvil. Time seemed to have exhaled its last breath and left us all marooned. Yet time did move on.

  The sun came up and the sun set. The days were cloudless and relentless in the dazzling brightness. The nights were star filled and moon washed. Through both my uncle stood on the patch of deck uncluttered by corpses and hung his head.

  I would say ‘hung his head in shame’, but I didn’t believe him capable of such an emotion. More likely he hung his head in self-pity. And yet he lived on at our expense. He lived on whilst the corpses of better men lay at his feet.

  I thought of all the stories he had told of his battles and wondered how many, if any, were true. Had he stood at the centre of such a death count before? Or was it all boasting or wild imagining?

  I could detect nothing one way or another from his face. His expression gave little away. He seemed to be in a kind of trance.

  And I could do nothing but watch him. Can you imagine what that was like? To never sleep nor even rest your eyes or move your head for want of a different view? To be trapped inside your useless body, peeping through your own eyes as if they were spy-holes?

  Hour after hour after hour, I lay there, feeling nothing save a growing disgust for my uncle. My mind was all that seemed to move in that stillness, and yet I could not move it beyond the confines of that deathly ship.

  I would have gladly gone away in my mind to happier days and happier places, but, with my eyes held open, I was unable to think of anything except the horror of the present.

  Hour after hour after hour, yet we – the dead crew – did not rot or reek the way we should have done. Some magic meant that, though we lay all day in the full force of the sun, we did not change.

  The sun should have scalded me but my eyes did not boil in their sockets. My skin did not peel and flake. My body did not bloat and split open like ripe fruit. Nor did any of the dead aboard the ship.

  Why? What was the purpose in our preservation? I could not help thinking that we all lay in some great pause before the next act would be played out.

  But whilst we did not change, my uncle looked day by day more like a walking cadaver, his eyes sunken, his skin cracked and burned. The albatross was mostly skeleton and feathers now, and still it seemed to weigh him down like a millstone.

  No anchor could have bent him more. It was as if he had the body of each member of the crew strung around his neck like a garland.

  One evening the setting sun painted the sky red and gold and lit up the timbers of the ship, as though all about us was burning. I wished it were true. I wished the whole ship was aflame and us with it if meant an end to this nightmare.

  I tried with all my might to take my mind to another place, and ghosts of my mother and my father and my home did come but they were frail and spectral and they faded like morning mist.

  This firelight bathed everything in its glow: the weather-beaten ship, the lifeless crew on the deck and my damned and hated uncle with the tattered remnant of the albatross.

  Whilst I stared at him, some small leech-like slime creature had escaped from the general mass about the ship and had worked its way up the hull and now flopped on to the deck, where it slid across the boards in a series of disgusting spasms.

  It twitched and jerked its way along, leaving a ghostly trail of slime behind it. It disappeared out of my view and only reappeared as it began to creep and slide across my chest and up my neck and over my face, my open eyes!

  Oh, the dread and revulsion as it blocked my sight! And then, all of a sudden, it was gone, and light streamed back. I saw the silhouetted shape of my uncle standing over me. He had clearly knocked the thing away.

  He looked down at my face and shook his head wearily. Even the horror of that thing sliding over my eyes could not make me grateful to h
im for removing it. All of it was his fault. All of this was his doing.

  He seemed to understand this in spite of my unmoving face and closed his eyes, and leaned back until he faced the sky, and then he let out a great roar and a moan that shook the ship like thunder.

  He turned back angrily, his eyes wild and wide, and he lunged forward, his grasping hand blurring as it raced towards my eye. I thought at first he was lunging at me, but I realised he was grabbing the slime-thing.

  He held the creature up to his face and snarled at it as it writhed and coiled in his fist, curling its tail around his wrist and forearm.

  It was black and featureless, sleek and slippery as an eel, but with the same eerie green glow as the rest of its kind. It raised what must have been its head and seemed to contemplate my uncle – though I saw no sign of any eyes.

  My uncle strode to the side of the ship and I could guess his intention. He was going to slam it against the rail, as a fisherman might do with a lively catch, and then toss it into the sea.

  He raised his arm high with the creature struggling in his hand, but just as he was about to bring it crashing down he seemed to freeze. Then slowly he lowered his arm.

  His breathing calmed and he once again held the creature in front of his face. This time he regarded it less with anger than with sadness.

  Slowly, and gently, he released the creature into the sea.

  XXV

  Hour upon hour passed by as I watched my uncle standing at the bulwarks, looking down at the sea – though how many, I could not say. I am certain that the sun set, and more than once.

  I wondered if he would ever move again and it was startling when he suddenly climbed up on to the mainstays – the braces that held the rigging for the mainmast – the albatross dangling from his neck, his body bowed with the weight of it.

  I assumed that he was making his peace with God before throwing himself into the water. And then I wondered if perhaps it was just the albatross that was going to end up in the sea. After all, who could force him to wear it now?