The Night Boat

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Hell of a thing,” James Davis said from across the table, throwing down a card. “I hear they find the boy with his head almos’ cut off. God A’mighty, I’da hated to been the one who find him. God A’mighty.”

  Smithson shook his head. “No, mon. It was his back broke clean in two. Somebody got him in one hell of a hug.”

  “His head was split open,” Youngblood told them over his cards. “I hear that from one of the doctor’s nurses. He go messin’ round that fuckin’ boat and he find bad trouble. Me, I wouldn’t go near that t’ing.”

  “What you know?” the dealer, a bulky man named Curtis, asked sharply. “Put down your money.”

  “It’s trouble, thass what I know,” Youngblood continued, throwing a few coins into the pot. “Been trouble since the white man brung it up. Me, I say take the thing out and get rid of the sonofabitch!”

  Percy leaned over the table, looking from one face to the next. “They say his eyes was starin’, like he seen Death comin’ for him,” he whispered. “The talk’s all over the yard. He seen Death reach out for him, and take him by the throat and…”

  “Stop that talk!” Curtis said.

  “Oh yah,” said the other man. “If you doan believe a man can see his Death comin’ then you crazy. That boy did and he die right there on the spot. I hope to God I never see it comin’. I hope it sneak up on me and take me from behind so I go quick.”

  “You crazy, mon!” Davis told him.

  “How many cards?” Curtis asked the men, trying to get off the subject.

  Youngblood said, “Few years ago I crewed on a freighter out of Jamaica, big industry boat. We runs through a squall an hour out, slowin’ us down, and we cuts to the west a few points to keep away from Jacob’s Teeth. We travelin’ at night, and ever’thin’ dark as hell and that wind blow bitter through our riggin’. Oh, that wind be bitter, mon, cut you to the bone. And the helmsman lose the way, him lost after thirty damn years at sea and a storm buildin’ at our asses! Wireless go out, nothin’ but crackle, then even the goddamn crackle gone. We goes on and on, zigzaggin’ for marks, seein’ nothing, no lights nor land, and all of a sudden we comes out in a place where the wind and the sea go flat. And by God there come up a moanin’, hard to hear at first but then louder and nearer, things bein’ said in different tongues, and wild screamin’ and laughin’ and carryin’ on…”

  “Shit!” Curtis said fiercely.

  “…and then we sees we not alone. On all sides goddamn boats. Steamers, freighters, sloops with full riggin’ catchin’ a breeze that wasn’t there. All of ’em green and glowin’, like St. Elmo’s fire cracklin’ up their lines and along them timbers. Oh, mon, I tells you I ain’t never seen a thing like that before, and I ain’t seen it since. Them boats criss-crossin’ in front of us, then passin’ alongside. And we sees men in the lines and workin’ the goddamn decks! They was just outlines of men, y’know, with hardly any faces, but you knew they was men…or they was men mebbe a long time ago. You see, we had come out in that place where the dead world and the livin’ one meet. Me, I hid my face and started to shake like mad. And them ghost crews all callin’ for help, y’know, because they stuck on that place forever, right there on the rim between the two worlds. Mebbe they not ready to pass on, or they tryin’ to find the way back to harbor, but all the time their boats layin’ down deep and just the specters ridin’ the caps. God knows, that place be Hell itself, all the shriekin’ and moanin’ so pitiful. The helmsman spin us about and we tracks into the storm. In a while he sight the buoys at the tip of the shoals, and we goes back the way we come, and by God no man ever kissed ground so happy like we did in Kingston.”

  The men were silent for a few moments, pretending to be absorbed by their cards. Curtis reached over for his bottle, swigged, and then peered into Youngblood’s haunted eyes. “I doan believe a word o’ that shit! I never seen nothin’ like that!”

  “Best pray you don’t, mon,” Davis said quietly. “Three cards.”

  A hefty black woman in a red dress passed by their table, glancing down to see if anything was needed. She cast her eyes around the bar, from the tables illuminated by harsh ceiling lights to those in the shadows at the rear. Damn Frankie King was getting drunker, louder and louder, and soon she was going to have to have Moe throw the bastard out. Two men had cornered a bar girl named Rennie, trying to work up something for later, but the girl looked bored and disinterested. Serves ’em right, the horny fuckers, she thought, with a grim smile. And then that other table back there, the two men sitting together, talking quietly.

  She had seen many things in this world, but nothing like the expressions on the faces of Steven Kip and the white man when they’d come in and taken that back table. She had served them drinks—beer for the constable, dark rum for the white man—and wanted to talk but they seemed to have no use for her. There was something in Kip’s eyes that made her go about her business, cleaning glasses behind the bar, watching for inevitable trouble. Now she approached them, moving her bulk through a group of drinkers, and looked down at their table. “Get you men something else?” she asked.

  “No,” Kip said, without once glancing up, and the white man shook his head.

  She paused a few more seconds, then shrugged her shoulders and turned. Frankie King was roaring drunk; he had a fighting look in his eyes.

  Kip watched her walk away and then coughed into his cupped hands; the cough tore at the linings of his lungs. He gazed into the sputum in his hands and wiped it off on a napkin. “Hallucinations,” he said quietly. “There were all manner of damned gases inside the thing.”

  “No. I’m not going to pass it off so easily.” Moore looked intently into the constable’s eyes. “How could we see the same thing? Even if we were affected by some kind of fumes, how the hell would we see the same thing?”

  Kip paused, taking a sip from his Red Stripe. When he put the bottle down he asked, “And just what was it we saw, David? Shadows, a boatful of debris…”

  “Come on, damn it!” Moore said, his eyes blazing. “By God, I know what I saw! I’m not going crazy!”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.” Moore shook his head, ran a hand over his face. “I was never superstitious; I never believed in any of the stories about jumbies and all that, but this shakes me, Kip. Something was moving inside the U-boat, and I felt…I felt…”

  “What?”

  “I felt hatred,” Moore said, “I felt the presence of hatred and evil inside there. Maybe my lungs were clogged with gases; maybe my eyes were failing me and I was half-mad with fear, but those things hated us, Kip. And they wanted to rip us to pieces.”

  “I didn’t see anything but old corpses inside the boat,” Kip said brusquely. “If you think there was anything else, you’re mistaken. Nothing but shadows, tricking the eyes. An echo that sounded like something banging iron. No telling what the gases did to our senses—amplified noises and made shadows into, well, into whatever you think you saw.”

  “Then where the hell is your lantern?” Moore asked him pointedly.

  “I couldn’t see where I was going; the damned walls were closing in on me, and I suppose I dropped it.”

  “You suppose?” Moore asked incredulously, a wave of anger and emotions rising within him. “YOU SUPPOSE?”

  “Keep your voice down!” Kip cautioned.

  “Goddamn it, don’t play me for a fool! I was standing beside you! I couldn’t say for certain what it was, but…”

  Kip suddenly reached over and grasped his friend’s sleeve, his gaze hardening. “Okay,” he said in a low, controlled voice. “Now you listen to me. These people are a superstitious, fearful breed, David. Tell them a story like this, let it leak out so the island gossips get it, and they’ll be carrying damned guns in the streets and locking themselves behind their doors.”

  “Maybe they should,” Moore insisted, unwilling to give any ground. “There’s something terrible about what’s inside it,
Kip. You know that as well as I do.”

  Kip looked at him uneasily for a moment. He lay some money beside his empty bottle and stood up. “I’m going home and get some sleep. I hope you’ll do the same.” He paused, then clapped the white man’s shoulder gently. “There’s been too much trouble over the boat. On Monday morning I’m going to have it towed out to deep water and have the hull cut open. You’ve got your Nazi trinket, and I’ve got a murder to solve. I think that’s enough.”

  “I hope to God you can get rid of it that easily,” Moore said in a hollow tone.

  Kip turned away and vanished in the crowd as he moved toward the doorway, leaving Moore sitting alone.

  As the constable wound his way through the clustered tables he passed the group of poker players, and one of them was leaning over, talking eagerly, eyes widened and voice lowered. Kip strained to hear, seeing the taut expressions on the faces of the others. “…it that goddamn boat bringin’ badness here,” the man was saying. “Me, I afraid to even go down there and see it. I doan want nothin’ to…” He looked up suddenly into Kip’s face, as did the other men. Kip paused, gazing around the table.

  The man who’d been speaking glanced across to the dealer. “Two fuckin’ cards,” he said.

  Kip made his way out of the whirling circles of smoke and noise into the coolness of night. And as he walked along the street to his jeep he caught the fetid odor of rot, a stench hanging in the air, blown across the island in the grip of the evening’s breeze. He knew what it was: the decay from the thing in the shelter oozing through the cracks and holes like a disease to infect all of Coquina.

  He reached the jeep, slid behind the wheel, and paused before starting the engine. He could lie to David Moore; he could lie to all of them, perhaps, as part of his responsibility as peacekeeper of Coquina. But he could never lie to himself. There was something terrible, something unspeakable in its evil, down in the guts of that U-boat.

  The wafting coils of rot came down around him, tightening at his throat. He started the engine, put it in gear, and drove through the darkness toward home.

  Eleven

  WHEN HE WAS a young boy running free and wild on the waterfront streets of St. Thomas, Cockrell Goodloe had seen a woman stabbed to death.

  It had been very fast, a blur of motion and color as a man in a red shirt darted from an alley, catching a lithe young black woman in a brown-striped dress around the throat. She had dropped a sack of groceries at her feet, and Goodloe had seen the sharp glitter of a blade as the knife drove down into her midsection once, then again. “You bad!” the man had shouted mindlessly. “You dirty bad!” The young woman had opened her mouth to scream. At first nothing came out but a terrible choking sound, and then the shriek came, a sound that raised the flesh all over him, that caught at his throat and made him clap his hands over his ears. The man had cast her aside, dropping the knife, and had turned to run. A few older men shouted and chased after him; on the blood-pooled earth the woman shrieked, on and on, a cry of desperation and horror. And then she was silent, and that was when someone bent down beside her.

  And now, forty years later, in the middle of a dreamless sleep, he heard that shriek again.

  At once he had pulled himself out of bed, his nerves tingling and heart pounding as they had done that day a long time ago. He was still groggy from sleep, and he stood in the center of his room, bare feet on harsh timbers, groping for the lantern at the bedside.

  “What that?” his wife asked, rising up in bed, a shadow in the darkness. “What that sound?”

  “Jus’ wait now,” he said. Matches. Where them goddamn matches? He found them, lit the lantern wick. The flame grew, warming the sparsely furnished room. He put on a threadbare shirt over his shorts and, taking the lantern, he crossed the floor to the single open window. He drew aside a tattered curtain and peered out into the night. His wife came up beside him and clutched at his shoulder.

  There was another loud, pained shriek. Sounded like a woman, stabbed and screaming. But no, that couldn’t be it. Goodloe’s farm was two miles to the north of Coquina village, and the next nearest place was another mile on. The shriek continued for a few more seconds, ending in a high, wild grunt. Then came the rooting of the hogs in their pen behind the storage shed.

  “Somethin’ at the hogs!” Goodloe said. He turned from the window, moving quickly past his wife, through a tiny kitchen to the back door. “Don’t you go out there!” the woman cried out in a frantic burst of words. “Don’t you go…!” But he was already through the door, grasping a hoe he had propped against a wall. He followed the lantern’s track toward the hog pen. Now more of the hogs were squealing, that terrible, almost-human sound of fear and pain, and Goodloe’s skin crawled.

  “Don’t go!” his wife called out, running after him, her gown flying.

  He hefted the hoe like a weapon as he neared the storage shed; it had been torn open, and one door sagged off its hinges. What the hell? he wondered, his mind racing. And then he had rounded the shed and stood near the fenced-in pen where he kept his livestock.

  The reddish-brown beasts, fattened for Saturday market, churned madly within the pen, jostling each other in a frenzy, rooting frantically and emitting squeals of terror. Goodloe couldn’t see for the dust they were kicking up, and he lifted his lantern over his head.

  In the dim shafts of light that pierced the haze of dust he saw that two of the largest hogs were down. Black blood glistened around their bulks, and he could see the gleam of bone through their wounds. The other hogs were startled at the light; their eyes were wild and red, and they jammed into each other to get away from the reek of death. But there was another noise, a sound above the squeals.

  It was the sound of flesh being ripped by the handfuls.

  And another noise, an unrestrained sucking, made Goodloe back away a few paces from the pen. He bumped into his wife, who grasped at him and trembled, her eyes widening because she had seen.

  There were other figures in the pen, forms that huddled around the hogs’ carcasses and feverishly tore the flesh, then bent over to suck from the flowing rivers of liquid. The beams reflected off the backs of the hogs, piercing the shadows and briefly illuminating things that appeared human and inhuman at the same time. When the light grazed them they looked up into the beams, and Goodloe caught his breath in terror. There were three of them, huddled over the flesh and pools of blood, and the light catching in their eyes burned like the raging centers of hell.

  “Oh God Jesus,” Goodloe whispered hoarsely.

  And then the things drew themselves away from the light, throwing up skeletal arms before their faces. Beside him the woman screamed, and then the forms got to their feet, half-hidden by the dust. Goodloe dropped his lantern down and when he did the things melted into the darkness, moving like aged men plagued by some terrible bone-rotting disease.

  Goodloe and his wife stood where they were for a few moments more, the woman crying and the man murmuring “Be quiet. Be quiet,” over and over again. In the distance they heard the brittle noise of the things crashing through jungle growth, and it wasn’t until long after that noise had faded that the man moved unsteadily toward the animals.

  “Get back to the house,” he told his wife. She shook her head, and he yelled, “GO ON!”

  She stepped away, looking fearfully beyond him toward the veil of the jungle, and then ran back to the farmhouse.

  Goodloe moved around to the opposite side of the pen to the place where the fence had been torn open. Stepping over shattered timbers, he knelt over the carcasses and examined the wounds. The throats had been ripped wide open, veins torn and bone gnawed. Large pieces of flesh and hair lay scattered at his feet. The other hogs, still unsettled and fearful, stayed crowded together in a far corner, seemingly mesmerized by the lantern. Goodloe stood up, stepped through cooling puddles and gazed off into the underbrush. The things had attacked and killed like animals, but in the dim light they had appeared to be men. They’d looked old and�
��yes…diseased. Sort of like lepers: pieces of their faces missing, a two-fingered hand thrust out, a head covered with what looked like yellowish sores. He trembled, staring off into the darkness.

  And when he left the pen he began walking quickly for his house, knowing that whatever they had been…men, animals, or some nightmarish breed of both…they might be back, and there was a rifle under the bed he had to load.

  Twelve

  THE SHIP’S BELL mounted in front of Everybody’s Grocers tolled six times. As the morning light strengthened across the island, the Square was filled with people in all manner of clothing and a wild rainbow of bright hues. There was much talking and laughing, and a couple of the island’s musicians had set up their steel drums on the grocery’s porch, intertwining their delicately sweet rhythms and motioning occasionally to an upturned hat used to catch coins.

  There were tables of goods for Saturday market—bananas, coconuts, papaya, corn, tobacco, a myriad of vegetables—and beneath the shade of a thatched-roof shed there were large ice-filled buckets containing snapper, amberjack, squid, and grouper. Bundles of sugarcane were arranged in stacks, and children paid for them by the stick. There were cardboard boxes filled with chickens, and hogs grunting and pulling at the rope collars attaching them to poles in the ground. An aged man in a straw hat sat in a patch of shade, moving back and forth in a rocking chair, telling ghost stories to wide-eyed children who crowded around to hear. There was much probing and handling of goods, and voices were raised in the babble of haggling for the best price and determining whether corn grown to the east or to the north was the sweetest.