The Night Boat

by Robert R. McCammon

  She smiled at him seductively and he looked at her appreciatively—she was still warm and glowing from the merging of their heated flesh. He stood over by the room’s single window, the moonlight streaming in through a broken red shutter. When he bent down to lace his shoes she saw something, a brief glimpse of a dark form moving past the window. She sat up in bed, catching her breath in a sudden gulp of air.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, thinking she was playing with him again. “Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

  Nora sat motionless, not knowing if she had really seen something there or not. Had someone been spying on them through the shutter? Someone her husband sent to keep a watch on her? She reached down for the sodden sheet and drew it around her like a shroud. Maybe it was even Cale himself, the bastard come back early?

  Johnny hurriedly finished lacing his shoes, eager to be going. The house was a mile or so from the village, and he had a long ride in the dark on his bicycle. The look in the woman’s eyes was giving him the creeps and, only half-joking, he demanded, “Hey. What you lookin’ at, damn jumbies?”

  The shadow fell across the shutter slats. She raised a hand, palm out as if to ward it off. Her mouth opened, and her voice came out as an eerie whine.

  Even as Johnny Majors whirled around, sensing the presence of something beyond the window, there was a sharp crack of splintering wood as a blow struck the front door. He cried out in fear, his mind racing. It was Cale come back, either that or some of Cale’s friends come to make him pay for screwing the woman.

  Glass and wood shattered, exploding into the bedroom. The shadow was battering its way through the window, and Johnny caught the brief flash of a wrench in the moonlight. There were more shadows out there, two, three, four, five, all merging into one pulsating darkness that ripped at the shutter and tore the glass away. Nora screamed, and backed into a far corner, Johnny looked around desperately for a weapon, hearing the front door being broken open. He picked up the chair beside the window and struck at the shadows, again and again, and for a moment they backed away.

  “Jesus,” he cried out, his chest heaving, holding the chair before him like a shield. “Jesus God who is that out there WHO IS THAT OUT THERE?”

  And in the sudden silence he heard them.

  Their breathing was ragged, painful, as if they were unused to the air, as if each lungful was raging fire. He could hear no voices, no movement, only the breathing of men suffering from a hideous, torturous disease, and that alone was enough to make him think he was going mad.

  One of the shadows moved forward, reaching slowly through the remnants of the window. The hand grasped a broken slat and began to pull it away.

  Johnny stood transfixed; the woman whined like a child from her corner. The hand, illuminated by the moonlight, looked gnarled and brown, the skeletal fingers like the claws of an animal. The nails were long and filthy; they scratched at the glass, a tiny noise which seemed tremendous to the trapped couple. And swirling about the room, borne in by the moist Caribbean winds, was the stench of rot; it caught them in smoky folds like some ancient fungus, or slime vomited up from the guts of the sea.

  In the next instant the shadow hurtled itself through the rest of the glass, its arms outstretched, black talons groping for the man. The woman screamed, a pitched, terrified noise—oh God, why wasn’t this Cale not Cale NOT CALE…

  The man raised the chair and brought it down upon the reeking thing that had crawled over the windowsill; he struck something as solid as bone but could not stop the phantom. He realized too late that the others had broken through the door and were now behind him. Something caught him around the throat: a hand, cold and bony, and another hand gripped his hair. Nora’s scream broke through the ceiling of her throat, then fell away to become a childish, insane babble. Johnny tried to fight free of the things, flailing with his arms and legs, but now they were all around him, the shadows pressing close, those terrible hands sharp icicles on his face, his throat, his arms.

  He threw out an elbow, striking one of them, and he heard the hissing of foul breath close to his ear; a tremendous strength picked him up and flung him into a wall, where he crashed headlong. He felt the searing pain of a broken shoulder as he slid helplessly to the floor. He twisted around, his heart hammering and the panic chewing at his insides, to face the shadows as they approached. The woman, crazed with fear, was crawling on the floor on her stomach toward a closet. He lay with his back against the wall, blood dripping from a broken nose, and saw the things as they reached out for him.

  The darkness covered them, but he could see their eyes. Red pinpoints of hate, they burned deep within withered skulls, unblinking and penetrating. The shadows breathed like the rising and falling of the elbows that fanned Hell’s blaze. Johnny Majors held up his hands in horror and supplication, for he knew the hour of his death had arrived.

  “Please,” he pleaded. He could not hear his voice over the din of his bursting heart. “Please don’t kill meeeeeeeee…”

  One of the things grinned; moonlight glittered off rotted, broken teeth, and a black tongue licked along what remained of lips.

  “Please don’t kill…” Johnny Majors whispered.

  Two claws descended; they grasped the man’s face, nails biting deep and drawing blood. And slowly, very slowly, they began to pull the man’s face apart, even as he screamed in pure cold pain. Fingers ripped away the nose in tatters of dripping flesh; a hand clamped around the throat, the strong hard nails plunging deep, choking off the screams, puncturing the jugular vein and releasing a dark red river. Johnny Majors lay paralyzed against the splattered wall, his eyes glazed in shock, unseeing, his nerves feeling the agony but his brain gone and unable to respond. The hand at his throat began to peel the flesh away, exposing veins and cords. The shadows moved closer as the odor and warmth of the blood wafted up to them. Another moved in, bent forward, the eyes whirlpools of red; its claw flashed out, ripping away a cheek that dangled on slivers of skin. A three-fingered hand, bare bone showing on the knuckles, probed at an eye, in the next instant digging in and tearing it away like a quivering grape from a vine.

  The man opened his mouth and moaned, then shuddered involuntarily. His head fell back, exposing the torn throat to the silver light. The punctured artery in his neck continued to pump blood in widening puddles.

  And then the crimson-eyed shadows fell upon him, lips and tongues voraciously consuming the face and throat. Teeth bit at flesh, tearing through and gnawing hungrily on bone; the weight of the things covered him over. He lifted one hand, but it hung useless, in the air, the fingers slowly curling, and then fell back. The room was filled with the noises of their feeding; the grinding of teeth on bone, the sucking at gaping wounds and the tearing away of chunks of flesh. Blood covered the floor, and some of the things bent down to lap at the puddles, maddened and starved for its sweet, strong taste. They began to tear the body to pieces, biting through bone for the marrow and the fluids. They worked faster and faster, more frantically, the sounds of their breathing echoing in the room. The woman whimpered where she lay. They pushed at each other to reach the wounds and when one wound was dry they groped for others, hissing in fury as another pushed them aside. They broke open new rivulets of fluids, like dark wine from fleshy casks. They were impatient and greedy as they feasted, ripping strips of flesh and hoarding them, squeezing out the final drops. And when they were finished with the man, when they had scattered him in grisly pieces and sucked him dry and found they had still not had enough to fill their collapsed veins and arteries, not enough to stop the terrible pain, not to quench the raging fire, they turned with a vengeance upon the woman.

  She watched them come, some of them walking, some of them dragging themselves across the floor toward her, and she was powerless to move. They were enraged because they were still not filled, not relieved of their inhuman pain, and their teeth were merciless.

  As they fed on her motionless body, one of the things disentangled itself and rose to
its feet. Blood smeared its lips and hands, and as it backed away from the mass of bodies it lifted a palm and licked at the human liquids. It stood in a corner, watching as the others tried to satisfy their hungers. The agony still remained, deep within dried and twisted tissues, within muscles drawn hard as stone, within flesh shrunken and wrinkled around the bones. With each breath the agony welled up, fanning the blaze ever higher. The thing in the corner put a hand to its throat in a vain attempt to still the searing pain. No pulse beat there; the heart had become a lump of decayed matter, and the veins had collapsed like the walls of empty houses. The thing shivered suddenly, in agony and rage and madness and hate.

  On the wall beside it there was an oval mirror. It turned its head very slowly and peered into the moonlit reflection.

  The only thing living in that face were the eyes, and those were sunken and terrible, slits of evil in the shriveled head. At one time, an age ago, those eyes might have been cunning and wolflike, full of glory and the blaze of battle. The once aquiline nose was flattened and almost rotted away, now just a pit into which the face was slowly collapsing. Patches of yellow hair clung to the misshapen scalp, and when the thing opened its mouth to scream against its own image, the broken, ragged-edged teeth glittered in the light.

  The thing lifted up its arms and struck the glass. A crack zigzagged across the mirror, slicing the vision of the corpse’s face into two disjointed parts. It struck again and again, the breath coming harshly through twisted lips; and the mirror began to fall to pieces. When all the glass had broken and the frame was empty, the thing let out a hoarse roar of torment and rage, the scream rising up and up and ending in an empty, choked sob.

  The others, feeding on the woman’s naked body, heard but did not pause in their feast. Currents of blood shifted around them like ebbing tides, staining the tattered remnants of their brown uniforms.

  On the front porch of the Indigo Inn, David Moore sat sipping a drink and watched a light far out at sea. A cigarette burned in an ashtray beside his chair; there was a half-empty bottle of rum at his feet. The light came off a freighter, traveling toward the port of a larger island. The sight of it stirred his wanderlust, made him think of distant shores, of people he had known and left behind.

  His time in Baltimore seemed like someone else’s life now. He had been a different David Moore then, a man naive and unaware in so many, many ways. If there was such a thing as fate, it had moved swiftly in his case, sweeping him along on a path from which he could never hope to find his way back. Nothing could ever alter his own personal tragedy; the scar would always remain, deep and ragged, on his soul. Since the deaths of his wife and son he had determined not to fall in love again, and though he had fallen in love with places and experiences he could never really get close to people again. It was too dangerous. He had been attracted to other women, yes; he had sought sexual encounters just as the women he spent nights with did, but he found it difficult to express his emotions anymore. He knew he drank too much because he was afraid of both life and death; rather, he was suspended between them, his senses still indulging in the multitudinous experiences his travels had offered him, while his deep-seated emotions were numbed and frozen. He was now just the shell of a man who had once run his hands through Beth’s hair and felt the power spark between them like currents of electricity. And yet, in all this time he had only felt himself grow closer to her. Sometimes, locked in a dream, he knew he only had to reach out a few inches and touch her supple naked body, draw her closer to him and hold her so tightly she would never be taken from him again.

  And thinking of Brian, his son, was just as difficult: What sort of man would he have become? What would it have been like to watch the boy grow up, go to college? God forbid that he would have taken a position at his grandfather’s bank and been stifled just as David had been. No, that was too easy. Perhaps the boy would have been intrigued by the ocean, and would have chosen a life that would have fulfilled him—in ocean engineering, or oceanography, say. Those were fields David might have picked, had not the family decided on his direction in life. He would have made certain that Brian knew there was an entire world of choices; he would have made certain the boy knew his life was his own.

  Now, when the rum had him and the sea was crashing across the reef, when he sat alone with the night, he couldn’t keep the images at bay very long: he and the boy playing touch-football in a wide, grassy park under fleecy clouds, Beth’s hand reaching for his under a long waxed table during a Thanksgiving dinner at the elder Moore’s estate, the flashing blare of a carnival merry-go-round, and their lips meeting as Brian, on a red-mouthed palamino, clapped his hands and grinned.

  And after it had happened, after the day of storm and terror, after the doctors had diagnosed his listlessness, insomnia, and, later, fits of rage as “survivor’s syndrome,” his father had confronted him in the sitting room of the family home; the old man’s icy eyes had stared at him through a flat haze of blue Cuban cigar smoke. He had not looked at his father, instead remaining intent on the flames that burned within a huge marble hearth.

  “If you’re in trouble with the police again, David,” the old man said finally, his voice a harsh rasp, “I’m not going to help you. I want you to understand that here and now. Your barroom brawls and destruction of public property have gone far enough.”

  The younger man sat in silence; a log shifted, then burst into flame.

  “Well? Have you nothing to say to me?”

  Moore slowly turned his head; their eyes met, ice against ice, and locked. “I didn’t ask you to help me last time,” he said quietly.

  “By God, someone had to!” The old man waved his cigar, knocking off ashes onto the Oriental carpet. “What was I to do, leave you in jail for the rest of the night, let some goddamned reporter find you in there drunk and do a story about how Horton Moore’s son went wild and shot out every damned traffic light for eight city blocks? Jesus! That would be exactly what my investors would like to see!”

  “Fuck your investors,” Moore said, in a whisper, too low for his father to hear.

  “And you’d be in jail right this minute if I didn’t have a lot of friends at City Hall!” the old man continued, his eyes blazing. “My God, boy, what’s to become of you? There are no black sheep in the Moore family; I want you to know that! And I won’t sit here and watch you become one, not while I have breath left in me, I won’t!”

  Moore nodded but said nothing; he heard the fire burning and to him it sounded like the noise of the sea over rocks.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” his father muttered, spewing out a stream of smoke that curled toward the painting above the mantel. The man in the portrait had another pair of accusing, solemn eyes: those of Moore’s grandfather. “Maybe because you were my only child, maybe that’s why I’ve been so lenient with you. Maybe I’ve loved you too much, I don’t know…I thank God your mother isn’t alive to see what you’ve become!”

  Moore faced his father at last, and the look he gave him was so fierce the old man was silent. “And what have I become? You’ve tried to make something of me that I never wanted to be; nothing bores me more than the thought of that office, those confining walls, the dead rustle of papers. I was a born executive, isn’t that what you told your associates? An executive in the Moore mold? No. I’m not going back there again.”

  “Then what will you do, you idiot? Goddamn it, that’s what you’ve been educated to do! There’s nothing else for you! My God, I know you’ve been through a bad time, but you’re behaving like a lunatic! They’ve been gone six months, David! They’re not coming back, and there’s nothing else now except putting your nose back to the grindstone and doing what you’re supposed to do!”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “I see,” the old man said, nodding; he took the cigar from his mouth and his smile was cool, sarcastic. “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “Both.”

  “Then if you won’t pull yourself to
gether like a man,” he said, leaning forward slightly, “you’re no son of mine. I’ve been wrong about you. I can see that now.”

  “Maybe.” David Moore stood up; their conversation was coming to an end, as it usually did, like the weakened last blows of weary gladiators. “I’ll tell you what I am going to do, and it’s something I’ve been thinking over for a long time. I’m going to travel; I don’t care where to. I’m going to keep on moving until I’ve seen what I want to see, and maybe until I find a place I can belong to again. There’s nothing for me here anymore.”

  “Of course. You’re going to run. From me, from yourself. Well, go on and run! I don’t care! Where do you think you’ll run to? What are you looking for, another girl like her…?” He stopped suddenly; the last word had come out as a half-snarl. His son turned on him, and the heat of his rage made the old man lean back. He closed his mouth, not too obviously because he didn’t want David to think he was frightened.

  Moore controlled himself and then said, “When I was a child and knew no better,” he said, “you told me how much alike we were. I’m a man now, and I see all the differences.”

  “Then go on,” the old man told him. “Run.”

  Moore looked once into his father’s face to find the man that was truly there; his father quickly averted his eyes. “I’d better go now,” he said finally.

  “I’m not holding you here.”

  “No. Not any longer. I’m sorry; I didn’t want to tell you my decision in anger.”

  “What does it matter? You’ve told me.”

  There was an awkward silence; Moore stepped forward, lifted his hand toward his father and extended it. “Good-bye,” he said.

  “You’ll be back,” the old man said, ignoring his hand.

  And it was then that David Moore had walked away from that life. He worked his way from country to country, living close to the earth or on a boat at sea, not knowing what drew him on but knowing he had to take that next step, and the next, and the next. He began to have the old nightmares again, the whirling scene of wind and wild ocean and Destiny’s Child breaking into bits beneath him. He began to hear Beth’s voice calling to him over a great distance, fading in and out; sometimes even close to his ear, the whisper of his name and then silence. It disturbed him, but he began to listen for it. At times he doubted his sanity, but sometimes he was certain she stood beside him, trying to reach him, separated only by the barrier between life and death.