The Night Boat

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Ahhhhhhh!’ You’re horny as hell!” VonStagel chided.

  “I admit it, then! The Paradise! We’ve got to go! You friggers think it’s a joy breaking your back in an engine room for a tour of duty, you’re mad! I want to fill my lungs with perfume before I have to smell the stench of oil and piss! The Paradise and then the Seamen’s Club! We’ll make the rounds tonight.”

  “I’m for it!” Drexil shouted.

  “What the hell?” VonStagel looked around. “Schiller, what about you?”

  And then there was a silence in the room as the door came open. A chill seemed to spread from the door into the Celestial Bar. The noises of eating and drinking died away; in the quiet the sailors could hear a tug chugging off in the harbor, and the distant wail of a foghorn. Boots clattered sharply on the hardwood floor.

  Korrin had come in from the street; two other men had accompanied him, but now they stood back as he swung his gaze around the bar, meeting the eyes of the crew one after one. “Heil Hitler!” he said sharply, clicking his heels together and raising his arm in the Nazi salute.

  The men stood to attention. “Heil Hitler,” they replied as one.

  Beneath Korrin’s U-boat officer’s cap the reddish-blond hair was just taking on flecks of gray, and his face was hard, the eyes fierce and compelling, intensely dark and powerful. He was a tall man, well over six feet, and he was lean and athletic-looking. A slight scar slashed across his upper lip gave it the trace of a scornful curl, and his cheeks bore the jagged scars of fencing wounds. He wore black gloves; a dark brown, rain-dappled coat was draped over his shoulders. Schiller squirmed under his gaze; he felt like an insect being probed by a microscope lens.

  “My name is Wilhelm Korrin,” the commander said quietly, his voice softer than Schiller would have expected. “So!” He looked around the room again, the dark eyes narrowing, as cold as the touch of ice on each man’s spine. “This is to be my crew.” He turned his head toward one of the men who had come in with him. “Gert, they become younger with every new command…but they age quickly.” The aide gave a brief, thin-lipped smile and the commander returned his attention to the seamen.

  “You’ll age,” he said. “Some of you may be old men when we return. Some of you may die. Some of you may be heroes. But rest assured there will be no cowards.” He held his gaze steady for a few seconds, and the man under his scrutiny nervously shifted his position.

  “Some of you I know from other boats; some of you will be under my command for the first time. What I require is very simple: You will carry out your duties as seamen under the German flag, and you will obey my orders without question.”

  VonStagel lifted his beer, and the commander immediately sensed the movement; Korrin stared at him in silence, and VonStagel lowered the mug from his lips. “We are sailing in the finest weapon the German navy has ever built,” Korrin continued. “And as long as you sail under my command each one of you will be a vital part of that weapon. You will breathe with the boat; you’ll roll with her, you’ll feel her vibrations down in the pit of your guts, and you’ll know her like a lover.”

  Korrin rested his hands on the back of a chair, the fingers in those black gloves as long and delicate as a surgeon’s. “I regret I won’t be joining you for the evening, but I’m needed at Command. Enjoy yourselves tonight; do what you like with whom you like, but be warned. We leave harbor at first light, and any man unable to report must answer to me. Is that understood?” He reached down for a bottle of red wine, poured half a glass, and then held the goblet up. For an instant Schiller saw the commander’s face through the glass: distorted, something barely human floating in a sea of blood. “A toast, gentlemen,” Korrin said.

  Glasses were hurriedly filled, lifted in silence. “To our good hunting,” the commander proposed. He drank a bit of the wine and returned the goblet to the table; without looking at his crew again he rejoined the other two officers and they left the bar together, their boots clattering in the street.

  There was a long silence in the room; someone muttered, and very slowly the activity resumed.

  Bruno shook his head. “It’s the Paradise for me,” he said. “Now or never.”

  Wreckage Discovered. Those two words had been seared across Schiller’s brain. Was it the wreckage of U-198? And if so, why wasn’t it where it was supposed to be, down in the murky vault of the sea? He had been the only one to escape, that terrible night so long ago, and now the past had resurfaced, summoning him here to this forgotten place.

  They were all dead, of course. All his friends and crewmates. He had been there at the end, watching the slow fall of the depth charges, seeing the ocean erupt again and again in geysers of white, roiling foam. But something still bound him to them, even after all these years; he was still part of them, still part of that weapon, U-198. Though he was older now, weaker, with failing eyesight and migraine headaches, living a life very different from the one he had once envisioned for himself, he was still a sailor in the German navy, and still a crewman of U-198.

  And perhaps, he thought, if it was his boat he should be there to say a final good-bye to his companions.

  He held up a hand for the bartender to see, and when the man approached he said, “Please. I’d like another beer…”

  Eighteen

  KIP RAISED THE HAMMER, brought it sharply down on a nail; another blow and the nailhead was flush with the plank. He reached for a third piece of wood from a pile lying next to the shelter wall and carefully hammered it into place across the closed door. Kip pulled at the timber reinforcement, decided another was needed, and hammered until the door was sealed tight. He stepped back a few paces, wiping the moisture from his forehead.

  He was soaked with sweat from his efforts and exhausted from carrying the planks across the boatyard. He stood where he was for a moment, staring at the blocked doorway. He needed a chain, a thick chain to pull across the door. And a padlock, something heavy and tough. There must be a length of chain here somewhere, he thought, or else I could get one off a boat moored in the harbor. But the shelter must be sealed. It must be sealed so nothing…so none of them…can get out. Another timber, he thought. Nail another timber in place there at the bottom of the door.

  “Hey! What in God’s name are you doin’ there!”

  Kip tensed, turned toward the voice. A heavyset black in denims and a bright-blue shirt was walking quickly and purposefully across the yard. The man was almost bald except for tufts of white hair on both sides of his head, and his eyes were wary, untrusting. He clenched a pipe between his teeth, and trailed gray whorls of smoke behind him. Kip stood where he was, the hammer still in his hand, and watched Kevin Langstree approach.

  The boatyard owner stopped abruptly, his eyes moving from the hammer to the timbers and back again. “What do you think you’re doin’?” he asked, not taking the pipe from his mouth.

  Kip moved past him, laying the hammer down on the jeep’s rear floorboard, beside the loaded rifle he’d brought along as a measure of safety. Langstree snorted in anger, stepped forward, and wrenched at the timbers.

  “STOP THAT!” Kip yelled angrily.

  Langstree whirled on him, teeth bared. “You lost your mind? Goddamn it, what goin’ on here, mon?”

  “I’ve sealed the shelter,” Kip said evenly, “so no one can get in.”

  “And I know what you got in there, too! Oh, yeah, Cochran told me all about it this mornin’! I know you got that bastard boat in there! Now you listen to me! I own this yard…ain’t nobody else own it but Kevin Langstree! What damn right you got to use my yard while I’m away?”

  “I had to get the boat out of the harbor…”

  “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THAT FUCKIN’ STUFF!” Langstree yanked the pipe out of his mouth; he was trembling with rage, and Kip fully expected the man to strike him. “You got no right, no right at all! Any other boat maybe okay…but NOT THAT ONE!” He motioned with a hand toward the shelter. “YOU KNOW WHAT THAT THING DONE TO ME? Do you? Blew my yard
to bits forty years back, set it afire, and killed a score of my best men! Those men died bad—crushed by metal, burned to crisps, torn apart—and me standin’ there in the middle of it, watchin’ the hell come down on us! No, mon, I can’t forget that! AND NOW THE GODDAMN THING BACK AGAIN! I don’t know where from, or how, but by God I want it out of my yard!” He turned again toward the doorway and began to pull at the timbers. There was a crack as one of the nails came loose.

  Kip grasped Langstree’s shoulder; he said in a grim, forceful voice, “I told you not to do that.”

  There was heat burning behind Kip’s eyes. The boatyard owner started to tell Kip to get away from him, but he thought better of it and took his hands from the timbers. “This is still my yard, by God…” he began.

  “Your yard, yes,” Kip said. “My island.”

  “I won’t have you tellin’ me what I can and can’t do, mon, no matter if you the law here or not! I’m away a week and the whole place gone to hell…this goddamn boat in here, my supply shed broke open and God knows what all stolen, everybody scared and not wantin’ to even come to their doors…”

  “What was stolen from your supply shed?” Kip asked him, a note of urgency in his voice.

  Langstree paused, searching the other man’s eyes. “Take a walk over there and you see, by God! The whole thing broke into, crates of oil, rope, timbers, barrels of fuckin’ diesel fuel gone. I don’t know what else—marine batteries, heavy-duty cable…”

  “Maybe it was requisitioned while you were gone?”

  “Hell, no! Ain’t no way that much stuff be used in a week’s time. We just got paintin’ and patchin’ jobs in the yard now…That’s heavy stuff been stolen, right out from under your damn eyes!”

  Kip caught the man’s collar. “Now you listen to me, Langstree,” he said very quietly. “You do as I say and leave the shelter alone. We’re towing the U-boat out in the morning and sinking it, but for now just leave it alone! DO YOU HEAR WHAT I’M SAYING?”

  The other man nodded, frightened by Kip’s intensity. He pulled free of the constable’s grasp and stepped back a few paces. “You crazy, mon, you crazy as all hell!”

  But Kip had already turned away. He climbed into his jeep and started the engine. Leaving Langstree standing there alone, he wheeled past the shelter and raced back for the village, anxious to get home and make sure his wife and daughter were safe. Kip felt infected by a strange madness, a fear that threatened to rise up and crush him. He had caught a glimpse of the truth today, and he realized how powerless he was to prevent what would happen. Oil, Langstree had said. Barrels of diesel fuel, ropes, cable. And batteries. God, no. He had seen the truth in Cale’s mad stare, in the half-consumed corpse of Johnny Majors, in the remains of the Nazi U-boat sailor lying on a bare plank floor. And now, worst of all, in the theft of marine supplies from the unguarded shed.

  In all the world there was one man who might be able to help.

  Boniface.

  Driving along the jungle road to the airstrip with the woman on the seat beside him, Moore could smell a storm in the air—a damp smell, full of heat, and the breezes had died completely. The entire sky was a gray, featureless canopy, the sun hidden, the clouds hanging motionless over Coquina. Jana had awakened more angry at Kip than she had been the day before, and he could still see her anger working in her face. She had hardly spoken to him this morning, just insisting she had to check her plane before sending her message to Kingston. Now, as Moore drove into the clearing, he saw the airplane ahead; it was still as they’d left it. But as he pulled up beside it he realized he was wrong.

  “JESUS!” she cried out, leaping from the cab even before Moore had braked. She ran alongside the plane, and Moore followed.

  “Goddamn it!” Jana raged, tears of anger springing up quickly and streaking her cheeks. She ran a hand along the jagged dents in the plane’s fuselage. The canopy glass had been broken out; in the front were the smashed remains of the instrument panel; wires hung loose, and the seats were ripped. She shook her head in disbelief and rushed past Moore to the open engine cowling. Moore saw the confusion of torn wires, cables and plugs missing. Someone had completely wrecked the plane. Jana slammed the cowling shut and stepped back, trembling. “Vandalism!” she said. “Pure goddamned vandalism and in the meantime Mr. Kip is sitting his ass in the village! He thinks he’s such a hotshot, telling people what they can and can’t do, and meanwhile he can’t even maintain law and order!”

  “I don’t understand it,” Moore said. “There’s no reason anyone would…”

  “It’ll take days to fix this engine,” the young woman raged, “if I can even get parts out here! Somebody’s going to pay for this mess!”

  Moore motioned toward the farmhouse beyond the strip. “Maybe they heard or saw something during the night. Come on.” He reached out to take her arm and she jerked away, then stalked along after him to the truck.

  Silence hung like a storm cloud over the clapboard house. There was an empty pen, a shed, a square of tobacco plants. On the porch was a bicycle frame without tires, and to one side of the house the hulk of an old car. The trees clustered above like a painted green ceiling, and only a few yards away the jungle grew wild.

  Moore and Jana climbed a couple of cinder-block steps to the porch. There was a screen door and beyond that the front door, which was wide open.

  “Hello!” he called into the house. “Anyone home?” He waited, expecting a reply. He thought he heard an odd drone, like the buzzing of insects, but he wasn’t sure.

  Jana reached past him and knocked on the door. “Is anyone there, for God’s sake?”

  But Moore had located the insect noise; he moved to the far side of the porch and looked down. Then he stiffened and stepped back a pace.

  Jana reached him. “What is it?”

  A dog lay on the ground, where it had probably been trying to squeeze its way under the porch. The head was almost severed from the body, and circles of flies groped around the gaping wound. In the animal’s midsection there was a second wound, exposing intestine. The hind legs had been torn away and the bones gnawed clean. “God…” Jana said quietly.

  Moore shuddered and returned to the door. He opened it and stepped into the front room.

  Chairs were overturned, tables shattered; glass had been broken from windows and lay glittering on the floor. “Watch your feet,” Moore told Jana as she came in behind him. And then his heartbeat quickened. He felt a crawling sensation at the base of his spine, and he knew they were not alone.

  Jana fought the urge to cry out, because suddenly the odor of blood had come to her, as strong as the taste of rusted metal in her mouth. She wanted to avert her eyes but couldn’t, and she stared at the body huddled in the corner.

  It was the corpse of a middle-aged black man; the face registered a look of shock and horror unlike any Moore had ever before imagined. The top of the head had been peeled back, a hideous mass of ravaged tissue remaining, and the throat was ripped open just as the dog’s had been. His right arm had been snapped off at the elbow and the ulna and radius both shattered as if something had tried to get at the marrow. A trail of smeared blood led from the room, along a hallway and through another open door.

  Moore moved forward cautiously, his heart hammering in his chest; Jana stood where she was for a few seconds, staring at the strange pattern the blood had made on a plastered wall, waiting for the surge of nausea to either flood over or pass. At last she took a breath of air with her teeth clenched, trying futilely to strain out the death smell.

  The second room, the kitchen, had been wrecked as well; it had no door, and only a few shattered windows. Utensils lay scattered about on the floor and there was a lot of blood but no more bodies. Looking at the scene of violence and murder, Moore felt a nameless, vaporish dread settle on him, as if something were whispering a message to him that he couldn’t quite understand. He shuddered. What had happened here? His mind dismissed the question abruptly, for the sake of his own sanity.


  Jana’s eyes searched his face. “What in the name of God…?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Moore said quickly. He grasped her arm, tightly. “Let’s get out of here.” He stepped away from the window.

  And it was then that the shadow fell across them, a thing framed in the doorway, reeking of rot and blood, claws lunging for Moore’s throat.

  Moore flung Jana backward and she screamed in utter terror; the thing grasped him, nails sinking into his neck, its weight bearing down on him. It hissed and drew back decayed lips from its yellow fangs. Moore struck at the thing wildly, trying to force it back, but it had him in its grip now, and in the nightmarish eye sockets he saw the red, volcanic fury of hatred.

  He crashed to the floor with an impact that almost knocked the breath from him; the thing, its once-human face a rotted horror streaked with fungus, struck Moore’s head against the floor and then, mouth gaping, straddled his torso to rip his throat away. Moore pushed against the sunken chest, feeling bones and hardened intestine, but he was weakened by the blow to his head. The darkness spun past his face like black trails of mist. He saw the mouth opening, opening, the points of teeth descending for the jugular vein.

  Jana was on her knees immediately, crawling forward. She threw aside the kitchen utensils, desperate for the object she knew must be there, and then her hand closed around it: a large, sharp-bladed butcher knife. She saw the thing’s teeth about to close on Moore’s throat, and she had no time to think; she tensed herself and leaped forward, grasping at the horror’s face with one hand and with the other driving the knife into its back, using all the power she could summon.

  The body shuddered beneath her; pieces of flesh came away in her hand, and the stench of rot choked her. She screamed in fear and anger, pulling the knife out and driving it in again, out, in, out, in, feeling the body begin to tense. Somewhere, she knew, this walking corpse must feel pain. Her forearm ached with the force of her blows, and as she wrenched at the face she felt something—the remnants of a nose, a cheek, or a lip—tear away.