by Ellen Datlow
The sea was calm. The boy lay stretched out on the quarterdeck. Swift shook him, and he stirred.
“You should climb,” Swift said. “The waves will wash you away in the next gale.”
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Swift,” the boy said. “I do not think I have the strength for it.”
Swift looked up at the rigging. The numbness in his muscles told him he did not have the strength to pull the boy up. But he grabbed the boy under his arms, and, leaning his weight back, managed to pull him to the rail. The stars overhead made fantastic patchworks of light. They reminded Swift of the Saint Elme’s fire that had danced on board, warning the sailors of their deaths. Such a beautiful thing, he thought in wonder. So beautiful.
He eased out his rope belt and lashed the boy to the quarterdeck rail. Then he lowered the coat into the sea. He dribbled some drops of salt water into the boy’s mouth. Lowering his own head to the deck, Swift lapped at the waves like an animal. The wetness in his mouth shocked him with a relief that surged through his body.
Then he saw the haunt.
It lay two points abaft the port beam, an eerie shine on the ocean. Its tendrils were out again, touching the water so delicately it resembled one of those strange underwater flowers that bloom and curl in foreign tide pools. It was feeding off the men on the raft, he supposed. Or was that something the Gunner had told him?
Swift soaked the coat in salt water and placed it on his back. The precious water cut icy pathways across his shoulders as he climbed, finding every groove in his shrinking body and pinching him with cold. Still he climbed, and at the crow’s nest he handed the three women who’d taken refuge there the sodden coat. They sucked at it eagerly.
“Will we die soon, do you think?” Mrs. Newman’s eyes had sunken so far it was almost a peeling skull Swift looked into, and not a face.
“Don’t worry,” he told them. “It will all be over soon.”
But it wasn’t.
The living and the dead lay side by side on the ropes. The thick, sweet smell of death lay over everything.
Swift climbed up and down the rigging, wetting the coat and passing it to those too weak to move. The boy was still alive. He could tell by the way his limbs quivered when the waves washed over them, though Swift could no longer detect the sound of breath when he dribbled water into the corner of the boy’s mouth.
In the evening, when the air began to cool, Swift went in search of survivors. He grabbed the bodies he passed on the shrouds. He patted their bloated arms, their naked, festering legs. No one moved. They were as still as if painted, upon a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.
Mrs. Newman’s swollen body sat upright, looking expectantly ahead. From time to time Swift followed her gaze, trying to make out what she saw.
“Well,” the governor said. “What will it be, men? To die of thirst’s a cruel death.” He gestured again with that foolish pistol of his. The Zong’s crew stared back at him. They’d been working on less than a quart of water since entering the Torrid Zone. The rainwater casks that loomed so lovely behind the governor’s pistol were never for the likes of them, and they knew it.
“A vote,” the first mate said. “A vote on this.” The first mate despised them all, Swift could tell.
“What’s the captain say?”
“Captain Collingwood’s sick abed,” the governor said. “And Kelsall’s been taken out of the chain of command. The situation is clear. The cargo must be jettisoned. Not all—only the sick and the dying. Collingwood has given me his list.”
“For your insurance monies, you want the cargo jettisoned. That’s murder, sir,” said the first mate. “I’ll have no part in it.”
“A vote,” the boatswain said. “We must have a vote.”
Silence on the Zong. A parched boat on a parched ocean.
“Who votes yea?” the governor asked. He raised his own hand and looked meaningfully around. A few of the officers hesitantly raised their arms in the air.
“If you vote yea,” the governor said, “I’ll see to it that every tar here gets a cup of water in his ration.”
Swift raised his hand.
Listen: there was a ship. She was called the Zong. She was low on water, or so they said. Part of her cargo needed to be jettisoned, or so they said. Her cargo was a collection of humans in chains.
They pushed the women and children out one by one, through the cabin portholes. The first ones went quietly enough, but the others struggled. The slaves could hear the screaming as it drifted through the hold. They understood they were going to die. You have no idea how much even a sick child can fight you when she knows you are dragging her to her death.
The governor kept pointing. This one, he said. That one. They took the healthy along with the sick. The governor couldn’t read, Kelsall said, so what was the point of a list?
Some of the tars joined in. This one. A woman scratched Swift’s arm as he reached for her chain-mate, so he grabbed her by the hair. This one.
It is no great thing to drown a slave or two, when they are sick, when they have caused trouble. It is a usual thing.
They jettisoned fifty-four the first day. The governor said the number should be noted down, for the insurance claim. 54.
The next day they marched the men up to the quarterdeck, this time with the chains and shackles still on. They’d fight less that way, the governor said. And the chains would drag them down quicker. 42.
They had to stop for a time, to see to the sails. One of the Negroes had some English; he said all in the hold were begging to live, promising to survive on no meat and no water until port. 38. Ten women committed suicide, leaping from the deck to join those in the waves below. 48. One man managed to climb back aboard. They kicked him from the netting, into the screaming ocean. 144 in all. Or maybe more? Despite the governor’s efforts, they’d lost count halfway through.
A usual thing. The descent into the stinking hold, the lash with the cat, the feel of a man’s arm resisting as you haul him forward, the shouts, the crying, the pleas. Usual things. Save that first day, when Swift rushed above, because the stench of the hold was getting to him, that was all, and he rested his burning arms on the gunwale, and saw. A pregnant woman, giving birth in the waves.
“I did not pass the whisper,” Swift told the boy. “Someone else did. I don’t know who. Before the second trial, one of the Gregson men found me on a dock, told me, ‘we know you’re a fine man, we know you’ll remember what’s good for you.’ But they never called me to testify. Not one of the seventeen crew were called. I never did get to find out what kind of man I was.” He raised his hand to scratch one of the scabs beneath his eyes, and noticed, idly, that his fingernail had fallen off. He did not remember losing it.
The boy’s corpse was swollen. Its swollen limbs still floated every time a wave washed in. In and out.
“There was a ship,” Swift said to himself, trying out the words.
The sun stared down.
Swift waited patiently as the haunt approached. On inspection, he agreed with Mrs. Newman that it might not be a ship at all. The haunt had the general look of a ship—the hull, the masts, the sails—but its cobweb gauziness confused his gaze. He could not figure how such a thing could sail. He supposed he’d soon learn.
The haunt was selective in the corpses it chose. It paused over one body, then took the one beside it, lifting it into the air in a slow arc. One of the corpses it pulled from the rigging fell to pieces, a torn limb splashing into the darkness. The haunt continued its delicate search, serene.
When one of its glowing tendrils passed near him Swift stiffened—some part of him still wanted to live—but then he forced himself to relax. He no longer had the strength to fight it, if he ever had.
The tendril brushed over his shoulder, a prickle of heat and light. It had a dry, horrid smell, like burning bone. The tendril drifted over to the boy, wrapped itself around his torso, lifted him up. Swift’s knots held—he was proud of that—but another tendril arced
out of the sky, ripping the rope away. The boy was carried aloft.
The haunt’s light faded, its too-white glare dimming to the muted color of the moon. Its graceful tendrils curled back to the ship like the closing petals of a flower. Slowly, relentlessly, it turned away from the Minerva.
“No,” Swift said. This last outrage was too much. “You don’t get to leave me here. I’m the last one living, aren’t I? The Jonah?” He expected the ship would turn back at the sound of his voice, but the haunt sailed on. It retreated with surprising speed into the darkness.
Cold flooded Swift’s body. They could not leave him here.
“Come back!” The words were hard to force through his parched mouth. He threw himself on his belly, scrabbled forward to the water’s edge, palmed in water to wet his tongue.
“Come back!” His voice was louder now. They’d surely hear him.
Darkness wrapped itself around him. He could not see the haunt at all.
Swift lay alone on the rotting deck, alone in the silent sea. He sometimes thought he heard the dead conversing above him, but he could not make out their words.
He expected them to return, the dead. Surely they’d come back. Decurrs and Glosse, the boy, the women, Bessie, Emily, his little girl as he’d seen her last with the blood cough dribbling down her dress. Or the slaves. No. 23, at least. Or the woman from the waves. Surely they had something to say to him. Some last accusation to make.
But they did not come.
The sun pressed down. The clouds hid the moon.
There passed a weary time.
Something edged into the corner of his vision. A triangle of white. A sail?
Swift lifted his head. A wave of relief filled him. It was the haunt, come to put things right.
But the sail was too solid. He could not see through it. It was, he realized wearily, a living ship.
He watched it pass. There was no reason now to summon it. No one to save.
But the silence pressed down on him, heavy and terrible. An agony of silence.
Swift tried to speak, but his tongue had withered with thirst. No noise came out. It was too far now, to reach the waves that washed the quarterdeck. So he raised his arm to his lips. Bit down. The warm taste of blood freed his tongue. He croaked. Shouted. Wordlessly. A cry from the deep.
The angle of the ship’s sails changed. They’d heard something.
Swift let his head sink down again. He floated on the deck, suspended between life and death, between one possibility and the other.
But he did not think he could die, not yet, not yet. There was a name on his cracked lips. A word like the blood in his mouth. A thing he had to tell.
Author’s Note:
“Years ago, while working at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, I came across a sailor’s account of his visit aboard a slave ship. I was struck by the effort he’d made to mobilize his fellow sailors against the slave trade. A few months later I read Marcus Rediker’s magisterial The Slave Ship, which helped put this document into context. In writing “Haunt,” I relied heavily on Rediker’s searing description of the daily operations of slave ships. Readers interested in learning more about sailors’ relationship to the abolition movement should consult this book.
The murders I describe in “Haunt” are all based on real incidents. Of these, the most notorious is the Zong massacre. As James Walvin points out, the mass murder that took place in 1781 became notorious not because the drowning of sick slaves was unusual (it wasn’t), but because British abolitionists made it their first cause célèbre. As with so many slave trade atrocities, we will never know the names of the Africans murdered on the Zong. Given the owners’ destruction of the ship’s logs, we will also never know the names of the ordinary sailors who executed the murders or (according to the first mate’s testimony) of the few who protested the massacre. Nor is it likely we will learn the name of the person who first passed the Zong’s story on to Olaudah Equiano, the black ‘able seaman’ and anti-slavery activist responsible for turning the massacre into a historical milestone. The victims of the Zong never received justice in a court of law. However, thanks to the efforts of Equiano and other abolitionists, their deaths helped galvanize the popular movement that, decades later, would abolish the transatlantic slave trade. This is not the same as justice. But it has its own meaning.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF COPYRIGHT
Introduction by Ellen Datlow. Copyright © 2018.
Deadwater by Simon Bestwick. Copyright © 2018.
Fodder’s Jig by Lee Thomas. Copyright © 2018.
The Curious Allure of the Sea by Christopher Golden. Copyright © 2018.
The Tryal Attract by Terry Dowling. Copyright © 2018.
The Whalers Song by Ray Cluley. Copyright © 2018.
A Ship of the South Wind by Bradley Denton. Copyright © 2018.
What My Mother Left Me by Alyssa Wong. Copyright © 2018.
Broken Record by Stephen Graham Jones. Copyright © 2018.
Saudade by Steve Rasnic Tem. Copyright © 2018.
A Moment Before Breaking by A. C. Wise. Copyright © 2018.
Sister, Dearest Sister, Let Me Show to You the Sea by Seanan McGuire. Copyright © 2018.
The Deep Sea Swell by John Langan. Copyright © 2018.
He Sings of Salt and Wormwood by Brian Hodge. Copyright © 2018.
Shit Happens by Michael Marshall Smith. Copyright © 2018.
Haunt by Siobhan Carroll. Copyright © 2018.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Simon Bestwick is the author of four story collections, a chapbook, Angels of the Silences, and five novels, most recently Devil’s Highway and The Feast of All Souls. His work has been published in Black Static and Great Jones Street, podcast on Pseudopod and Tales to Terrify, and reprinted in Best Horror of the Year.
A new collection and a new novel, Wolf’s Hill, are both in the works, and his novelette Breakwater is forthcoming from Tor.com. Until recently, his hobbies included avoiding gainful employment, but this ended in failure and he now has a job again. Any and all assistance in escaping this dreadful fate would be most welcome. He lives on the Wirral with his long-suffering wife, the author Cate Gardner, and uses far too many semicolons.
Siobhan Carroll is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and the history of exploration. She trained as a tall ship sailor on board the Kalmar Nyckel and qualified as a rigging-climber in 2012. All errors in nautical jargon and judgment are to be laid at her door rather than that of the Kalmar Nyckel crew. For more fiction by Siobhan Carroll, visit voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com.
Ray Cluley’s work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. It has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories 2013: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and in Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres series. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story and was nominated for Best Novella and Best Collection. His short fiction has been collected in the mini-collection Within the Wind, Beneath the Snow and Probably Monsters.
Bradley Denton was born in Kansas in 1958, and his first professional story appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1984. Since then, he’s published a few dozen more stories and five novels, including Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Blackburn, Lunatics, and Laughin’ Boy. His work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and Edgar Allan Poe awards—and it has won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Brad currently lives on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, with his wife, Barbara, and their dogs, Sugar and Tater. His most recent story collection is Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas.
Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. Dowling’s horror is collected in Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Ho
rror Guild Award), Aurealis Award-winning An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated Blackwater Days. His most recent books are Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and his debut novel, Clowns at Midnight.
His newest collection, The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours, was recently published by Cemetery Dance Publications. His homepage is at terrydowling.com.
Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling author of Snowblind, Ararat, Tin Men, and many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he co-created the cult favorite comic book series Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. Many of his short stories are collected in Tell My Sorrows to the Stones. As editor, his anthologies include Seize the Night, The New Dead, and Dark Cities, among others. Golden has also written screenplays, radio plays, non-fiction, graphic novels, video games, and (with Amber Benson) the online animated series Ghosts of Albion. He is one-third of the pop culture podcast Three Guys with Beards.
Brian Hodge is one of those people who always have to be making something. So far, he’s made twelve novels, over 125 shorter works, and five full-length collections.
Recent and upcoming works include I’ll Bring You the Birds From Out of the Sky, a novella of cosmic horror with folk art illustrations; his next novel, The Immaculate Void, coming in early 2018; and a new collection, coming later in the year. Two recent Lovecraftian novelettes have been optioned for feature film and a TV series.
He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
Connect through his website (brianhodge.net), Twitter (@BHodgeAuthor), or Facebook (facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections. Most recent are Mapping the Interior, from Tor.com, and the comic book My Hero, from Hex Publisher. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.