We set a great fire roaring in the hearth, and cracked open what barrels we could find. We set to feasting and drinking with a gusto that only men far from home and long at sea will understand. Any guilt we might have felt at such merriment in a place where so much destruction had been wrought was quickly assuaged by the warmth of the fire and the sweet tang of the ale.
The evening began in fine fashion. The chef excelled even his own high standards. He managed to turn a few stone of potatoes, a leg of salted pork and some rough vegetables into a mouth-watering feast for each of us. Ale flowed freely. For a while we were almost warm.
The Pastor recited “The Lay of Lady Jane”, as bawdy a verse as any old sea-dog might muster. It was all the better coming from such an austere man of the cloth. Jim Crawford told a tall tale, of a man from Orkney who was twelve feet high with a two foot cock which he used to beat off foreign raiders. The room was filled with laughter.
“A tune from Stumpy Jack,” came the call. When the eldest of the crewmen started on the squeeze box we could almost believe ourselves at home port once more. All went quiet as he started up, a slow dirge that we all knew well, for we had sung it many times afore, albeit with lighter hearts and warmer circumstances.
Our ship is weel rigged
And she’s ready to sail
Our crew they are anxious
To follow the whale;
Where the icebergs do float
And the stormy winds blaw
Where the land and the ocean
Are covered wi’ snaw.
There was an outcry. The squeeze-box died with a last wheezing drone.
“Let us have no talk of sailing towards snow and cold,” Jim Crawford shouted. “’Tis sun we need, and hotter climes.”
“Then mayhap you’ll find this more to your liking?”
Stumpy started again.
Once more we sail with a northerly gale
Through the ice and sleet and rain.
And them coconut fronds in them tropic lands
We soon shall see again.
Six hellish months we’ve passed away
Sailing the Greenland seas,
And now we’re bound from the arctic ground,
Rolling down to Hispaniola.
Stumpy Jack was old, but his voice was as clear and true as a young man’s. It rang through the rafters, promising of hot sun and even warmer women. We all joined in on the chorus.
Rolling down to Hispaniola, my boys,
Rolling down to old Hispaniola.
We’re southward bound from the arctic ground
Rolling home to old Hispaniola.
Bald Tom found a tavern wench’s skirts. There was much bawdy laughter as he moved among the tables pretending to be a doxy. If the talking and laughter was somewhat muted, and if some drank more than was good for them, we pretended not to notice. The Ulsterman told of his exploits against the Turks in Vienna, Bald Tom, still wearing the wench’s skirts, regaled us with tall tales of the Amsterdam brothels. Stumpy Jack sang the old whaler’s songs before starting up that old sailor’s favorite, “The Girl from Brest.” We sang along at the top of our voices. The tavern rang loud, keeping the cold at bay, for a while at least. For that short span, we made a common bond that life was good once more. It nearly was.
By the time things went bad most of the crew were too far into their cups to notice.
“Bald Tom went out to the privy some ten minutes ago. He has been gone too long,” the First Mate said to me.
“’Tis not unknown for him to linger over a shit,” I replied.
“Aye sir,” the First Mate said, “But even for Tom this is too long. Especially when there is free ale and meat on the table.”
He had it right. Bald Tom often loitered over his ablutions. He was teased mightily over it, but this was overlong, even for him. The Pastor and I, being the two men least addled by the drink, went out into the night in search of him.
The cold was like a wall, hitting us square in our faces and taking our very breath.
“Let us leave him to his business,” I said. “’Tis too cold to go looking for the steam from his doings.”
In truth, it was not just the cold that had me trembling. I had the fear of the Devil in me. The memory of the fire inside the tavern was fading fast.
But the Pastor was made of far sterner stuff than I.
“Let us continue and look a little further. He may be in trouble,” the Pastor said. “And there is evil afoot tonight. I feel it in my bones.”
“Then have at it man, but make it quick. Already the cold bites at my ankles. At the rate the men are drinking, there will be none left for our return.”
He led the way round the corner of the tavern, tall and proud in his faith while I cowered, cowed behind him like a whipped scoundrel. I am not sure if the Pastor prayed, but I was surely calling on God’s protection more than enough for both of our souls.
Bald Tom will be on the privy for the rest of eternity. We found him in the shed, squatting over the rough hole in the ground, skirts pulled up around his waist. He was no more a cold block of flesh; frozen solid in mid-shit. Had the Pastor not been there I believe I may have laughed…in jest at first, then later in hysteria.
“Lets us have him inside by the fire,” the Pastor said. “Mayhap he can yet be revived.”
I nay-sayed him.
“Leave him be. He is deader than anything I have ever clapped eyes on. Deader even than Jim McLean of Banchory, and he had his head taken off by a corsair.”
The Pastor stood over the body to say the words that would speed Bald Tom to paradise, but I had known the man well. I’m certain that the resting place of his soul would be more than warm enough to thaw any part of him that was yet frozen after the journey.
The Pastor was taking overlong over the formalities, while all I could think about was the fire in the hearth, and a flagon of spiced rum. I was about to turn away when it suddenly got colder…colder even than the time the sea had frozen around us off Trinity Bay in Newfoundland and we’d been locked in place for a month with naught but salted fish to sustain us. Ice formed in my beard. It crackled to the touch. The last half-inch of my moustache came away in one piece in my palm.
We looked at each other, the Pastor and I. I hope my own eyes held less abject fear than I saw in his, but I cannot guarantee it.
“Have you finished telling the Lord of Bald Tom’s piety?” I asked, speaking loudly, as if the very sound of my voice would keep the cold at bay.
“That I have Captain,” he replied. “But it is my own soul that concerns me at this moment.”
“I have found that a flagon of spiced rum is good for most things that ail the soul,” I replied.
“Then let us retire within, and you can show me,” the Pastor said. “For it is colder than a fisher-wife’s teats out here.”
Outside the shed something moved, a shuffling, stumbling. Then came a moan, as of a man in pain.
The Pastor instinctively moved to help and stepped outside.
“No,” I called. I put out a hand.
He was dead before I could help him. He froze, stiff as a board in the wink of an eye. One cold eye stared up at me in amazement before it too froze, all sight going as life left him. He fell, solid as a stone, part in, part out of the privy door.
The sound of shuffling got louder. The cold cut deep, reaching my bones. I am ashamed to say it, but I was mightily afraid, struck immobile with terror as whatever manner of thing was beyond the door crept closer. The noise stopped just outside the shed door. Something pulled the Pastor out of the shed, his body scraping on the ground like a slab being slid from a tomb.
I bent, thinking to take his arms, to try to counter whatever had him. But one touch of his bare hand was enough for the cold to burn my palm to the bone. Whatever had the Pastor tugged at him again. The body was dragged away out of my sight. But not out of hearing.
My ears were assailed with cracking and crunching…teeth grating on icy fles
h and bone. I could not tell you what manner of creature made such foul sounds, for I could not bring myself to look.
The sounds continued for some time while the cold crept ever deeper through me until finally I could take it no longer…I squeezed past Bald Tom and made an attack on the shed’s rear wall.
The noises of feeding stopped. Behind me the privy door creaked as something pushed inside.
I renewed my attack on the wall, kicking and punching like a man possessed. The wall fell before me like dry kindling. There was a single moment of icy cold, a breath on the back of my neck that I will remember for whatever life I have left, then I was away and heading for the tavern as fast as my legs would take me.
* * *
Cole put the journal down…his hands trembled so much he could hardly hold it. He took a long swig of his beer.
It’s there. In black and white. He was nearly taken. They WERE here, even then.
He’d always known that Hunter’s Dock was special. For the last year he’d been trying to prove it. Now it looked like he had a chance.
* * *
Johnny Campbell sat in the WEIR radio van dreaming of network glory. He’d been dreaming about it for a long time now…since way back in junior high school when he used to practice mock reporting of his family’s habits at the kitchen table, from high school when he must have written thousands of letters to stations begging for a job, any job, and through to more recently, where he had a job, but glory still seemed some ways away.
At this moment it seemed like an awfully long way away. When he’d answered the ad for WEIR, they’d promised excitement at the cutting edge of the modern media. He hadn’t realized that meant sharing a cold, draughty van on an empty dockside with a man who had the eating habits of a starving mongrel.
“Tell me again,” he said to Frank Riardon in the passenger seat. “How exactly is this helping us up the greasy pole to network stardom?”
Frank turned and gave him a big shit-eating grin full of burger with extra ketchup. It was a full minute before he’d finished chewing enough to speak. By then a goodly portion of the ketchup had found its way onto his jacket.
“As I said earlier,” Frank said, wiping the stain in to blend with the others already there. “All the other broadcasters are either down at the morgue or outside the police precinct.”
“That’s where the action is,” Johnny protested.
“Yes,” Frank said, as if explaining something to a particularly stubborn child. “And if anything happens there, everybody gets the same story. Nobody gets happy. Whereas if something happens here…”
Frank waved his arms expansively, sending a scattering of shredded lettuce across the dashboard from his rapidly disintegrating burger.
Johnny picked a stray piece of greenery from his sleeve and deposited it in the ashtray. He pointed out over the empty dock.
“There’s only that one bored cop here. He’s hardly going to start anything, is he?”
“Oh ye of little faith,” Frank said through another mouthful of burger. “It’s obvious that your brain needs stimulation. ‘Frankenstein’ to ‘Top Gun’ in two.”
“Too easy,” Johnny replied. “Karloff to Nicholson to Cruise.”
Frank smiled, a film of ketchup oozing across his upper lip
“By the end of the night I expect you to come up with one that’ll stump me…otherwise you get to buy breakfast.”
They’d been playing this game off and on for about a year now. Frank usually had the edge due to an almost encyclopediac knowledge of movies, but Johnny knew more about Frank’s one blind spot—westerns.
He worked on getting from ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’ to “The Unforgiven.”
Frank finally finished the last of the burger and swept the remains off the dashboard to join the flourishing communities of previous meals on the floor. He saw Johnny looking.
“It’s the maid’s day off,” he said, smiling. “Besides, you should be more worried about how you’re going to pay for my breakfast. I hope you’re working on it?” he asked.
“Yep. I hope you’ve got plenty of cash yourself,” Johnny replied. “I’ll have two full cooked breakfasts if you’re going to keep me out here all night.”
Frank took a chocolate bar from his shirt pocket. When he opened it Johnny noticed that it was partially melted, brown stains immediately covering first Frank’s fingers, then the front of his jacket.
“We’ll give it till midnight,” Frank said. “All the cool stuff always happens at midnight.”
Frank went quiet for a while. Johnny went back to trying to come up with the film links.
His mind kept wandering. They’d arrived late at the scene, after the cops had cordoned everything off. Frank had managed to get some opinion pieces from the usual kooks in the crowd, but had wanted more. While Frank went looking for a cop, Johnny had sat in the van, looking out over the scene to where they were loading one of the victims onto a stretcher.
And that’s when he’d seen it. When they lifted the stretcher, one of the medics had failed to get a proper grip. The yellow sheet slipped. An arm slid into view…a blue arm, with a hand showing black nails, an arm that made a noise of stone grating against stone as the hand hit the ground.
The medics had tucked it back away under the sheet, but it was too late for Johnny…the image was already seared into his mind. He tried to think of films, of Eastwood or Van Cleef, Leone and Morricone, without much success. He was grateful when Frank broke the silence.
“Say. When was the last time that cop did the rounds?”
“About an hour ago,” Johnny replied. “Why?”
“Beat cops like to be regular. Something’s up. Watch the shop…I’m off for a look-see.”
“Frank. Wait.”
The older man was already out of the door and away across the dock.
“For a man who says he’s watched so many movies, you know jack-shit about horror,” Johnny shouted after him, but he got no response. He watched Frank slip under the cordon and cross the dockside to stand above the dig.
Johnny rolled down his window and shouted out.
“Can you see anything?”
Frank turned, made an exaggerated Shhh with his finger. He headed down into the dig out of sight.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Johnny waited, for a gunshot, or a strangled scream, but there was no noise. He put his hand on the door handle. He drew it back immediately…almost burned by the searing cold.
A fine spider’s web of frost painted itself on the windshield in front of him. He cranked up the heater, setting it to demist. The windscreen slowly cleared, but only long enough to show a whirling snowstorm rise like a waterspout from the dig, rising up in slow-mo, a twister made of snow, rolling and tumbling silently above.
It climbed high up over the dock, then, collapsing on itself, dumped snow on the van, as if someone had just emptied a dumper truck full of earth. The van shook, and the suspension squealed.
Nothing could be seen out of the window but a wall of snow.
He tried the wipers. They strained, moved an inch, clearing just enough to show Johnny that it was still snowing heavily outside.
The weight of snow pushed back against the wipers, which strained and wheezed with the effort. After a second Johnny smelled burning. Red lights flashed on the dash…he’d just burnt out some of the electrics. The wipers died with a final whistle. Snow filled the whole windscreen.
Johnny put the van into reverse and stamped his foot on the accelerator. Wheels spun and the engine roared like a trapped beast, but it was going nowhere. He kept his foot pushed down, hard.
The engine roared, coughed twice. Everything went suddenly quiet as it cut out. The heater groaned in sympathy, before it too failed. Cold seeped through the door, digging deep into Johnny’s bones.
Well, you wanted something to happen. Now what are you going to do hotshot?
The radio buzzed.
“Johnny? Frank? Anybody there? You’d b
etter not be sleeping on the job.”
Johnny made to reach for it, but an icy lethargy had him in its grip.
Outside the driver’s side window something moved in the snow, a human shape, a greyer shadow amid the white.
“Frankie? Help me!” Johnny whispered.
The van door was torn open and the blizzard poured in. A myriad of biting flakes, as sharp as razors, blasted Johnny’s face into raw meat.
His sight began to dim.
The looming figure moved to fill the doorway.
“Frank?” Johnny breathed.
The last thing Johnny saw was a closeup of the stained jacket as Frank climbed into the cab.
“Bringing up Baby to Tombstone in two,” he screamed.
But Frank wasn’t listening any more.
And soon neither was Johnny.
* * *
“Let me get this straight. You left me standing like a dork on the dock while you left the scene. Now you’ve brought me all the way out here to look at that?”
Mike Kaminski looked down at the dried-up thing on the trestle below him.
Jackie Donnelly nodded.
“I’m sorry about walking off earlier…it was the shock.”
“Just like the one I got when the Lieutenant found out,” Mike replied.
“I really am sorry. But I think this relates to your case.”
“I might think so too, if I had any idea what I was looking at?”
“It’s a heart.”
“That thing?”
Jackie nodded in reply.
“It’s a human heart. And someone has bitten into it.”
Mike bent for a closer look.
Night of the Wendigo Page 6