The Night Boat

by Robert R. McCammon

  And he was still pondering the problem when he saw a man running wildly toward him, almost tripping over himself. He waved his arms, calling out frantically; it was Andrew Cale, co-manager of the boatyard. The man was almost hysterical; his eyes were sunken, glassy hollows, and tears streamed down his face. There were marks on his bare arms where thorns had scratched him.

  “KIP!” he cried out, his chest heaving. “Oh, mon, thank God I find you!” He grasped the constable’s arm and pulled at him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Kip asked. “What’s happened?”

  “My house…” he said, unable to catch his breath. “Oh God…my house…”

  Kip’s spine went rigid. “Get in,” he said, and reached over to help the man.

  “Me…and Mr. Langstree just got back…from Steele Cay…and my house…I can’t go in there…I doan know…I doan know…” Cale whimpered.

  Kip turned on the road that would take them to the man’s home. He stopped the jeep next to the cinderblock steps leading to the door and Cale struggled out. “Come on, Kip!” he said breathlessly. “Please, mon!”

  Kip stared at the house. The front door had been torn off its hinges and lay against the porch railing. Windows had been shattered, the pieces of glass speckling the yard. Floral-printed curtains still hung in the remnants of the frames. They had been shredded into strips. Cale grasped at him. “Please…”

  As soon as Kip stepped across the threshold into the house he smelled it: the reek of blood and above that another smell. Rotting flesh.

  Cale pushed ahead of him and started down the hallway. The man stopped and stood framed in a doorway staring at something. “NORA!” he called out suddenly, his voice trembling. But he did not move, even as Kip reached him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “There,” Cale said, pointing a finger.

  Kip’s eyes followed his finger, and he froze in horror at what he saw.

  On the floor, amid shattered wood and glass, was something that at one time had been a man.

  Now bare, savaged bone glistened. The eyes were gone, as was the nose, and the teeth seemed oddly white and perfect in the remains of the head. On the torso, arms, and legs there were innumerable sickle-shaped wounds, where hunks of flesh had been ripped away right down to the bone. Bites, Kip thought suddenly. Rat bites. There was nothing left of the throat; it had been peeled and stripped away down to the spinal cord, all the veins brutally torn. The body lay in a clotted, wine-red ooze. Cale choked and turned away, staggering for the door but unable to keep from vomiting. Kip used all his strength to control the wave of nausea that surged inside him, but he felt dizzy and off-balance.

  When the sickness had passed he forced himself to go into the bedroom. The window had been broken open; in one corner of the room there was a blood-matted sheet, and droplets spattered the mattress. Kip steeled himself, bent down, groped in the corpse’s rear pocket and found a wallet. He opened it and looked for identification.

  Johnny Majors. Jesus Christ in Heaven!

  “WHERE’S MY WIFE?” Cale asked, wiping his mouth, his eyes swollen and heavy-lidded. “Where is she?”

  “I…don’t know,” Kip said, surprised at the hollowness of his own voice. One of the man’s hands lay beside the head; it had been gnawed or broken from the wrist, exposed bones licked clean.

  “WHAT DID THIS?” Cale screamed suddenly. He backed away from Kip, his hands clawing at the corridor wall.

  Kip bent to the floor, swatting at flies that whirled around the body. There were boot marks in the liquid pools. He caught the tremble of panic that welled within him. Covering the corpse with the sheet and struggling to control himself, he quickly made his way out of the house and supported himself against the hood of the jeep. Cale came out on the porch, his eyes glazed and lost. “Where’s Nora?” Cale said hoarsely, in a voice barely audible. “What happened to her?”

  But Kip hadn’t heard. He was staring off into the jungle, not really knowing what he was seeing; at last his mind cleared and he was aware that vegetation had been crushed in a path that led away from the house. Approaching the jungle fringe, he saw the impression of a boot in the still-damp earth. Then three others. Cale called out again, “Where’s my wife?” but then the constable was out of earshot, following the path of crushed thorns and snapped vines.

  Every few feet there were drops of blood, and ahead the pathway turned through a grove of dead, rotting trees. He followed it for perhaps twenty minutes, knowing he was insane for going alone and without a weapon, but still, he was compelled to follow. And then, breaking through a high growth of thorns, he saw he had come to one of the old, decaying plantation great houses, a square slab of a structure over which dead trees hung in a tangle of shriveled branches. The roof had collapsed into the second floor, and black timbers protruded from the open sockets of windows. A second-floor balcony sagged, its supports fallen away, and vines crept along the gray, weather-battered wood.

  And here the boot marks ended.

  In the distance a bird shrieked sharply, then was silent. Kip looked around, found a branch he could use as a club if necessary, and walked toward the concrete stairs leading up to the massive doorway. There were more droplets of dried blood; Kip stopped just in front of the door, listening, but he heard nothing. He tightened his grip around the club and kicked the door open; it swung out, ripping off its hinges and falling to the bare floor with a loud, echoing crash. Kip stepped into the cold dampness of the room, his skin crawling as he saw the puddles of blood and a bloody smear where something—the woman’s body?—had been dragged. He stood in a huge, high-ceilinged room with corridors branching off on all sides; a wide stairway with a broken banister reached the second floor before plummeting into darkness. Kip could see the tree limbs through the holes above.

  He moved slowly along one of the halls, the club held up before him, his free hand feeling the way. A few feet farther and something streaked across his hand: a lizard scrambling for the safety of a hole. He pulled his arm back, stifling a cry, and waited until his pulse had calmed down before going on. He heard the lizard racing along the corridor. At his feet there were more droplets and smears of blood, leading him into another room. Get out of this place, he told himself. Get a gun, bring back more men to help, but get out of here before it’s too late! But then the next step brought him into the room, and the terrible stench of rot choked him. Timbers had fallen in from the ceiling, littering the floor, there were square windows, devoid of glass, from ceiling to floor, and through them streamed thick columns of gray light.

  A body lay on its back in a corner.

  Kip moved forward, slowly, his eyes widening and his teeth gritted against the stench.

  It was not the corpse of Nora Cale. It was a skeleton from which almost all trace of flesh had fallen away; it wore the tatters of a uniform—brown, matted with grime and fungus like the cloth Turk had clutched in his death-grip—and its arms were outstretched as if seeking either death or mercy…or perhaps both. Kip stared down into the empty eye sockets, feeling his practical, trained resolve seep away.

  It was madness, he thought; the real world was a place of boundaries, of blue sea and sky, green jungle, clapboard and stucco buildings, flesh-and-blood people. There was no Damballah, nor Baron Samedi, nor jumbies that haunted the village. But what was this, then, this skeleton in the remnants of a Nazi uniform? His soul cringed away from the things that lurked beyond the edge of the fire; all his life he had tried to reach a balance, to make reality his base and core. But that central part of him, hidden from all others and often even from himself, did believe. It had faith in the same superstitions, the power of voodoo, the evil things that sucked life from night sleepers, that moved through graveyards carrying cold steel scythes, that stood in shadows and regarded the world of light through hooded eyes.

  And now here this dead thing lay, miles from the risen U-boat; time had finally caught up with it, collapsing its bones and flesh with a touch of sea air. Kip backed away from
it; he had seen more blood on a windowsill and he knew the things had taken whatever was left of the woman with them. NO! NO IT CANNOT BE! Yes, the voice whispered, the voice of his “uncle,” his teacher, yes, it is true remember the forces of a man live on after death after death after death after death…

  These things that he had feared all his life, that he had buried at the back of his mind, were real.

  And suddenly the brick wall he had built inside him so long ago broke open, a cracking of mortar grown weak and useless, and the howling dark forms swept over him.

  Seventeen

  THEY DID NOT LIKE the foreigner. If he had approached any of them, if he had sat in on any of their card games, or taken a shot of rum or even talked to them, perhaps their feelings might have been different. But he had locked himself away in his below-decks cabin, not speaking to anyone, even paying extra to have a steward bring his meals to him. The black, hard-eyed seamen didn’t like that; he would only be on board for a three-day trip, but they didn’t trust whites anyway, and this foreigner was very strange.

  The man seemed to dislike the sun; his flesh was a pasty white, his hair dull, tinged with yellow and combed straight back in an old style. He had never come up on the freighter’s deck during the day, but there were stories circulating that he’d been seen walking the forward deck in the dead of night, standing at the bow as if trying to sight something off in the distance. And he had spoken to the galley steward in a strange accent: not British or American, but something else. When the freighter tied up at the commercial wharf in Coquina harbor, the seamen were glad to be rid of him. The captain had told the first mate and talk had trickled down through the men that he would not be returning to Kingston with them.

  As the seamen worked their lines, the foreigner emerged through a hatchway onto the deck; he squinted, though the sun was dim in the gray sky, and walked past the men toward the port side where the gangplank would be lowered. He carried a battered brown suitcase and wore a suit, once-white, that had yellowed with age. The men moved out of his way so he could pass. He walked slowly, stepping over lines and cables, and he winced occasionally because today his leg was bothering him; he thought it must be the humidity and the heat, perhaps even rain coming. One could often judge the weather from the pain of shattered bone.

  He waited until the gangplank was secured and squinted again, the light almost painful to him. When he crossed over onto the wharf, one of the seamen behind him muttered, “Damn good riddance…”

  The man walked along the wharf for a moment, limping slightly, then stopped to gaze across the village ahead. A small boy lugging a basket of bananas was passing, and the man asked him, “Please. Is there a hotel here?”

  The boy looked up at the stranger, turned, and pointed at the blue house on the hill. “Indigo Inn,” he said, then quickly moved on.

  “Danke,” the foreigner replied. He gripped his suitcase and began to walk toward the street beyond.

  The jukebox began to throb in the Landfall Tavern as coins tinkled down through metal cylinders. Its treble range had deteriorated, so all that came through the speakers was the bass guitar and the low thud-thudding of drums. The bartender, annoyed because he’d expected this to be an easy day, drew mugs of beer and poured rum for the group of seamen who’d come in off the freighter to quench their thirsts.

  At a back table, sitting alone, the foreigner sipped from a mug of beer; the corner was dark, and he was glad because he was not eager to have the men notice him there. Before him on the table was a tattered piece of the Daily Gleaner dated four days earlier, which he had bought in Jamaica. When he saw the item on the third page he’d had to sit down in his room at the boarding house and read it again very carefully. Then again. He’d made a telephone call to the paper and was referred to an officer at the police station by the name of Cyril McKay. “Yes,” the officer had told him, “it’s under investigation now, yes, a small island called Coquina to the southwest of Jamaica. Do you have any particular interest?”

  “No,” he’d said. “Only curiosity. I was a naval man, you see.”

  And now he’d reached the island. He’d wanted to get out of the sun before starting that long walk up the hill. He looked down again at the two-paragraph item, staring at the headline: WRECKAGE DISCOVERED.

  So strange, so strange, he mused, how one’s past never really releases its hold; it always remains—in a phrase, a remembered sight, sound, or smell—a sharp, aching feeling one might have watching the freighters cast off their lines and head for the open sea. He felt swallowed up by those two words. Wreckage Discovered. After all those years? Thirty-five, thirty-six? He had just turned sixty. More like forty years. Enough time for him to grow older and grayer, for the muscles that had been firm and tight to turn to flab, for his long-unused sea instincts to become dull.

  And though he was barely sixty he looked older. That was because of his time spent in the prison, suffering humiliations and beatings from a patriot of a jailer who had spent his fury through his fists, then had calmly sat down outside his cell to discuss the hopelessness of the Nazi cause. The man knew how to beat his prisoners where the bruises didn’t show, and they were told that if they cried out they might be smothered in their sleep. The medical records would record them as having died of heart attacks.

  He had never said a word. When they took him to the black room and opened up a hole in the roof for the hot tropical sun to burn down on him he had kept his lips a tight, grim line. Who was your commander? the one who spoke German had asked, while the other, a younger man, had watched. You’re the only one who survived; there’s no use in being loyal to them anymore. They’re dead, food for the fishes. They wouldn’t have been so cruel to you! There are women and children back in the Fatherland who want to know what’s become of their loved ones! Whose names are they going to have chiseled on the gravestones? Your boat destroyed the Hawklin, isn’t that right? And then it got into Castries harbor and torpedoed a freighter moored there, isn’t that right?

  Sweat had streamed down his face; the sun had cooked him, searing his flesh through that ceiling hole, but he had not spoken because he was still one of them, still under orders, and he would never betray them as long as he lived.

  “Refill?” someone asked.

  He looked up; the bartender stood over him. “Excuse me?”

  “Another beer?”

  “No.” The bartender nodded, moved away. The German glanced around the room at the freighter’s crew. They hadn’t liked him, he knew; they had scorned him, as if his pale flesh carried a disease they were afraid of catching. But the freighter was the quickest way to get here and though the cabin he’d shared with a dozen cockroaches had been cramped he hadn’t paid very much for it. He had been on a lower deck, and at night he could hear the racket of the huge diesels coming through the bulkheads. It was a good sound, a sound that reminded him of good men and other times and places.

  Someone nudged him roughly on the shoulder and he turned his head. Who was it, grinning from the dark with teeth as large as tombstones? Yes, yes. VonStagel, with his bushy red beard that made him look like a wild Viking. And beside him in the smoky bar the morose, brooding Kreps. Everyone at their cluster of tables was drinking, laughing and shouting; the sounds came from everywhere at once, glasses clinking, someone cursing drunkenly, others singing a bawdy mariner’s song about the ladies left behind.

  “Hear, hear!” shouted Bruno, the big-shouldered diesel mechanic. “Bring on the dancing girls!”

  A roar of laughter, plates clattering, chairs scraping the floor. The waiter placed a pink mound of pork on a bed of potatoes and sauerkraut before him. He dug into it hungrily, for tomorrow it would be rations—moist eggs, lukewarm coffee, stale bread, and sausages that would rapidly collect fungus from the dank air.

  “…and so what was I to think?” Hanlin, the senior radioman, was asking VonStagel. “There was the petty officer—you remember Stindler, the pompous asshole—standing in the whorehouse balcony holdi
ng his prick out and parading so the good people of Berlin could see! My God! Well, anyway, the patrol wasn’t long in coming, I can tell you, and they hauled him off in a wagon with his dick still hanging out of his pants! And to think we all thought of him as a saint! St. Stindler we called him on U-172. My God, how wrong could we have been?”

  “And what happened to him?” VonStagel asked. “Did he get his piece or not?”

  “Who knows about that? I only know he’s not signed on the new boat…”

  Farther down the table, Lujax, the E-motor mate, and Bittner, the diesel stoker, were talking quietly, absorbed in their conversation. “…dangerous waters,” Lujax was saying. “…Atlantic boiling…”

  “…it’s all dangerous now,” Bittner replied. “It’s a question of strategies. Who’s the smartest, not who’s the strongest…”

  A large Nazi flag had been tacked tightly across one wall so there wasn’t a single wrinkle. The chair just beneath it was vacant; the Commander was noticeably, perhaps pointedly, absent. The executive officers were talking, eating, drinking, but watching the door that led out into the street.

  “Sonofabitching Tommies almost got Ernst’s boat last week,” Hanlin was saying between mouthfuls.

  “I heard something about that,” added Drexil, a fresh-faced, raw recruit sitting beside Hanlin. “It happened just off Iceland…”

  “Sonsofbitches came out of the sun,” Hanlin continued. “Slammed bombs all around the boat, doused their tower pretty well, but they managed an emergency dive…”

  “Damned lucky,” Kreps muttered.

  Bruno was admiring the tavern girls; there were three of them carrying big trays laden with mugs of beer back and forth from bar to men, from bar to men. Two of them looked fine—blond girls, firm-fleshed and youthful—and he’d heard stories about the taller one from Rudy. The third was a snaggle-toothed monstrosity and not worth crossing the street for. Yet she was the most gregarious of the three, throwing herself down in the laps of the men and joining in their bawdy choruses. “The Paradise,” Bruno said. “They’ve got women over there who dance on your tables!”