The Night Boat

by Robert R. McCammon

  And with the next solid plunge of the knife the thing shrieked—a high, hoarse sound driving through its throat—and reared up, knocking the woman backward. She lost her grip on the knife and it remained planted in the thing’s back, just below the left shoulder blade. Moore shook his head dazedly, crawled away, and watched as the nightmare collapsed to its knees, vainly trying to reach the knife; it shook its head from side to side, like a dying animal, its mouth opening but uttering no sound. It flopped on its belly and began to squirm and shudder as it crawled for the doorway, its breath quickening, the fetid smell filling the room. The thing lay full-length, one hand inching very slowly toward the door frame, trying to pull itself into the corridor. Then it expelled a long, terrible hiss and lay motionless, its arm still thrust out, fingers grasping at the frame, its body sprawled in a broken S-shape.

  Jana heard herself screaming; she couldn’t stop, even though the noise was frightening her, as if someone else were screaming at a distance, louder, louder, louder, more uncontrollably. Is that me? she heard herself say. Is that me is that me is that me screaminggggggggggg…

  “JANA!” Moore said harshly, shaking her. “JANA!” He wrenched her around and she abruptly stopped screaming; she looked at Moore as if she didn’t know who he was or where they were or what had just happened. He put a hand to his throat, feeling the marks of the nails welling up on his flesh, and looked again at the corpse. Standing up, bracing himself against a wall, he moved toward it and then pulled the knife from its grip. There was no blood on the blade, no blood around the dead thing on the floor. It was totally dry, a thing without life fluids. He put the toe of a shoe under it, grasped the remnants of a shirt, and turned it over onto the back. That red fire he’d seen burning in the sockets was gone; all that remained was empty darkness. The skull grinned at him, its lips still pulled away from the teeth, a mockery of both life and death.

  Staring into those hollow sockets, Moore realized the U-boat’s legacy. They were condemned to a life-in-death, a torment of souls suspended in decaying flesh. Some unholy power had kept them alive, as living corpses in an iron coffin…and he had helped free them from the crypt.

  Jana had to search to find her voice. “What…is it…?” she whispered, unable to stop trembling. “My God…my God…”

  Moore turned toward her and pulled her up from the floor. He led her out of the farmhouse, keeping his grip tight on the butcher knife because he knew there could be more of them lurking very near. They quickly crossed the porch to his truck, and he told her to get in and lock the door behind her.

  As he climbed behind the wheel, Moore heard a crashing noise coming through the foliage perhaps twenty yards behind him; he twisted around, hearing Jana cry out, and saw the shadows approaching from the deeper jungle, the dark things plowing through the tangle of brush and vines. Moore turned the key in the ignition; the engine started, and he pressed his foot to the floor. The truck roared in response, its tires throwing up clumps of wet earth as Moore raced away up the road. In the side mirror, he saw them break through the jungle fringe, and then he was across the airstrip and heading back for Coquina village, his hands holding the wheel so tightly his knuckles were white as bone.

  “WHAT WERE THEY?” Jana clutched at his sleeve, her eyes wild and confused; the fear had her now, and she was unable to think.

  “They’re alive,” he said, his eyes darting left and right to pierce the green shadows on each side of the twisted road; the reality of what he was saying numbed him, and his temples were bathed in a cold sweat. “I saw them in the U-boat, and Kip saw them. I didn’t believe…I didn’t want to believe…” He touched the red marks at his throat. “I don’t know why or how, but I know they’re alive…”

  He reached the village, speeding along the deserted streets; he saw the jeep was gone from its space in front of Kip’s office, but he hammered on the door repeatedly in the vain hope that Kip might be there. As he turned away from the door he looked up and saw the thick roil of clouds in the sky, dull gray, blinding white, traces of black far in the distance. He crossed the Square, finding the grocery locked and the blinds down over the windows; he reached the hardware store and knocked on the front door there, but the place was deserted. He looked down High Street from store to store; everything was locked up and quiet, the streets empty, a ghost town. A white circle of gulls swirled above Kiss Bottom, their screams coming to him on currents of wind; they swept down across the surface and then back again toward the sky. Moore watched them flying in formation out to sea, as if abandoning Coquina.

  When he returned to the truck he couldn’t look in Jana’s eyes because of what he would see in them, and because he was afraid of what she might see in his. He started the engine, put the truck into gear, and drove on through the Square, climbing High Street.

  And at the hotel he saw the front door was open.

  He tensed involuntarily. Though he’d left the door unlocked, he remembered closing it that morning. Moore slid the butcher knife into his waistband, his nerves raw.

  “Wait here,” he said to Jana. “I’m going in first.” He left her sitting in the truck and walked cautiously up onto the porch; with one hand he drew out the knife, and with the other pulled open the screen door. He stepped across the threshold, his senses as aware as those of an animal; abruptly, he froze in place, trying to see into the dim room.

  There was a man sitting in a chair; a suitcase sat on the floor beside him. He held the glass paperweight in his hands, his eyes focused on it as if he had found something that had been lost for a very long time. Moore let the screen door bang shut behind him, and the man hastily—and awkwardly—rose to his feet.

  Nineteen

  “FORGIVE ME,” the stranger said in a thickly accented voice. “The door was open, and I came in to wait.” He held up the paperweight. “Please…where did you get this?” The man dropped his gaze, saw the knife in Moore’s hand. “I…meant no harm,” he said very quietly.

  “Who are you?” Moore asked.

  “My name is Frederick Schiller. I was told I could find a room here, and when I walked up from the village I couldn’t find anyone…”

  Moore stood where he was for a moment trying to place the accent. Of course; it was German. He put the knife down on a table, still cautious.

  “Where did you get this?” Schiller asked again, holding the paperweight as if it were a precious jewel.

  Moore ignored his interest. “How did you get here?”

  “By freighter from Jamaica.” He paused for a few seconds, then reached inside his coat and brought out a cheap brown wallet. “I can pay,” he said.

  Moore waved the wallet aside. “I don’t know what your business is on Coquina, Mr. Schiller, but it’s a bad time for you to be here.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  “There’s a storm building. I can see it gathering in the sky, and the last hurricane we had almost tore this place apart.”

  “My business won’t take very long,” Schiller replied. “Now…please. This object…where did you find it?”

  “Aboard a boat…”

  Schiller closed his eyes.

  “…or to be more exact, what’s left of one.” The screen door opened behind Moore and Jana came through. She looked from Moore to Schiller and then back again. “Are you all right?” he asked her anxiously.

  She nodded, running a hand across her forehead. “Yes…I’m just very tired. I can’t…I can’t think very coherently yet.”

  “Is the young lady ill?” Schiller asked.

  “I think I’d better lie down for a while,” she said to Moore.

  He glanced over at the German. “The kitchen’s at the back if you want a cup of coffee. I am going to take her upstairs.” He was intrigued by the man now and wondered what his story was. He helped Jana up the stairway to her room at the end of the hall and threw back the covers of the bed for her. When he started to move away she reached up and grasped his forearm, her hair fanning out across the pillows. “I
don’t understand,” she said, searching his face. “I don’t understand what’s happening here, and I’m afraid, and I don’t know what to do…”

  He stood looking down at her for a moment and then smoothed the hair away from her forehead, gently, as he had done for another woman a long time ago. “Rest,” he said. “Do you want a light on in here?”

  “No,” she said. She lay very still for a few seconds and then she put her hands to her face. “I saw it…I touched it…Dear God, I can still smell the rot of it on me…”

  Moore crossed the room, shutting the terrace doors. When he looked at her again her head was turned away from him, the blond hair almost silver in the pale light. He wondered if she would drift off to sleep; if she did, what would she dream of? The corpse with the mangled brains? The grinning face of a thing that should have been dead forty years ago? She shifted her position, her hands still at her face, and Moore heard her take a long, painful breath. He stood beside her a while longer, then left the door open as he went out.

  He walked to his own room and checked the forty-five in the drawer. It was loaded with one clip, and there were two spare clips. He returned the gun to the drawer and went back downstairs.

  The German sat holding the scorpion paperweight, a whorl of blue cigarette smoke around his head. When Moore came back into the room he put the object on a table beside his chair. Moore paid no attention to him, but poured himself a shot of rum and took a long swallow. With the afternoon sun hidden behind clouds, the light was a pale gray; though the room was dim and cobwebbed with shadows, he made no move to turn on a lamp.

  “So,” Moore began, finally turning to him. “What’s your business?”

  Schiller exhaled a stream of smoke. “The U-boat.”

  “I thought as much.”

  The German reached inside a shirt pocket and offered the newspaper clipping. Moore looked at it briefly. “That woman…Dr. Thornton…is a marine archaeologist here to take a look at the boat too. I don’t know what interest you might have in the thing, but aside from the historic value it’s a worthless hulk. I wish to God I’d never found the damned thing…” His voice trailed off, and he took another drink from his glass.

  “And you’ve been inside?”

  “Yes.”

  Schiller sat back, sighed, pulled from his cigarette. “How much remains?” he asked in a strange, distant voice.

  Moore examined him: white hair, sharp nose and chin, high cheekbones, weary, tormented eyes, deep lines across the forehead. Representative of a salvage firm, perhaps, sent from Jamaica to appraise the hulk as scrap iron? No. He was German, and that was too much of a coincidence. “Not enough for salvage,” Moore said, testing him.

  A thin smile crept across the man’s face, then quickly faded. “Salvage? No. I don’t care about salvage; I would think she’s beyond that by now. It’s incredible, you know. I thought by now the sea would have broken her into pieces, that there would be nothing left at all.” He raised his eyes to meet Moore’s. “It’s true, then, just as the paper said.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Moore sat where he could see the man’s face. “It’s true.”

  The German raised the paperweight again; Moore saw that his hand was trembling slightly. Schiller turned it in his grasp, running a finger along its smooth surface. “In 1942,” he said, “I was a seaman in the German navy. I was aboard U-198 when she was attacked and sunk by British subchasers out beyond your island.”

  Moore leaned forward, his expression frozen.

  “Yes,” Schiller said. His gaze was hard; the eyes, like bits of glass, focused on a spot at Moore’s forehead. “I was the only survivor. All the others…except one…went down with the boat, and that man who didn’t was burned to death in a spillage of flaming oil. I called for him…I tried to find him but the sea was littered with bodies. The air stunk of smoke and crisped flesh. My boat was gone; it had dropped out from underneath me. Oh yes, I would have done the same had I been the commander. There wasn’t time you see. And then I was left alone with the noise of shelling and alarms and screaming…” He caught himself; his eyes softened a fraction and he stabbed the cigarette out in an ashtray. “Forgive me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to go into that.”

  “No,” Moore said, still stunned. “I understand. But how is it you came to be on Jamaica?”

  Schiller absentmindedly wiped his lips with the back of his hand; it was a habit he had kept over the years. All the men who held bridge watch on U-boats had done it to varying degrees, wiping away salt crust as the sea spray thundered against the iron bulwark, again and again, a hundred thousand times a day. Another link with the dead, he realized, touching his mouth. “I live on Jamaica now,” Schiller said. “I came back in the late fifties to teach history and the German language at the University of the West Indies at Mona. At least that’s what I first told myself. I think perhaps I really returned to the Caribbean because of the boat.”

  Moore waited for him to continue, but when Schiller was silent he asked, “The boat? Why?”

  “Because,” Schiller said, with an effort, “as long as I shall live I will be a crewman…the last crewman of that boat.” He felt along the sides of the paperweight again and then put it down. “I was never a loyal patriot to the Nazi cause, and perhaps I realized all along that Hitler was driving our country to utter ruin. But for a brief instant of history…a very brief instant…we were glorious, like a flame burning itself into oblivion. That I will never forget.”

  The room was still; there was a steady drone of insects outside, and the breeze sang through the screen door mesh in a soft whisper. “I don’t believe you’ve told me your name,” Schiller said.

  “David Moore,” the other man told him, putting the glass of rum down and getting to his feet. He switched on a lamp; in the sudden light the German looked more aged than he was. His eyes were filled with memories.

  “I would very much like a drink,” Schiller said. “Sometimes I need it, you know.”

  “Yes. Me too.” Moore poured rum into another glass and gave it to the man.

  Schiller took it gratefully, sipped at it, and then listened to the song of the insects. He stood up, went to the door, and stared out across the darkening harbor. “A beautiful island,” he said after another moment. He did not turn back toward Moore. “You do know that my U-boat almost destroyed it?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you…feel any bitterness?”

  “Some would.”

  Schiller nodded. “An honest answer. This island lay within our patrol grid, you see, and we were ordered to shell the naval yards. We knew the British were repairing some of their ships there…and, well, it was war…”

  Moore sat down again, watching the man.

  “I remember…” Schiller said quietly, “I stood on the bridge during the first shelling, and I counted the explosions on shore. I felt so distant and detached from what was happening. I knew we were destroying human beings, yes, but still…they were the enemy. On that particular night the subchasers didn’t come, and the shelling seemed to go on for hours. Oh, there were shore batteries firing back, but we lay beyond their range, and we watched the flames grow against the night like wild red flowers on a field of black velvet. The commander observed through his binoculars, and after he ordered cease fire, when the echoes of the deck gun had finally all died away, we could hear the screaming…” Schiller was quiet for a long time; Moore stared at him. “When the commander was satisfied, we continued our patrol.”

  “And you never felt remorse over something like that?” Moore asked.

  Schiller turned toward him, his brow furrowed, as if pondering a question he couldn’t fully understand. “It was my duty,” he said. “But be assured I paid for it, yes, and many times again. We returned to the area some days later; the commander suspected work had been done to repair the yards, and he wished to shell them again, before the work could be completed. Some distance from your island the watch sighted a ship, moving slowly j
ust ahead; we submerged and tracked it for some time. It was a freighter. We attacked with torpedoes, but the warships lying in your harbor were alerted by the flares and caught us from behind. I was on deck at the time, along with the man I’ve already mentioned. We were swept off in the crash dive…” He paused, staring out toward the sea.

  “What happened to the boat?”

  “I don’t know,” the German whispered. “Or rather I should say, I’m not certain.” He drank from his glass. “The subchasers circled the area in which the boat had gone down, and they began to release their charges. Their Asdic and sensor devices had targeted my boat and they hammered at it, hour after hour. All this I was forced to observe from the deck of one of the British ships after I’d been hauled into a dinghy. The sea boiled like a volcanic crater, vomiting up sand and coral and fish blown to pieces. I thought about the men inside the U-boat, hoping to find safety beneath tons of water.

  “A depth-charge attack is a savage thing, Mr. Moore. You hear the iron bend under the detonations, and you pray to God it will not bend too much and that the rivets will stay sealed. A thread of water bursting through a pin-hole break can cut a man’s head off at the greater depths, and a rivet can ricochet like a bullet, pass through flesh and bone and metal bulkheads. And the noise…the thundering shriek of underwater explosions, the squeal of an iron plate, the sound of the Asdic beams like handfuls of gravel tossed against the sides of the boat.” He shuddered and looked away. “But you must not make a sound. You must hold back your fear and the screams that threaten to burst from your throat. Because if you scream the men with earphones at their stations perhaps three hundred feet above will hear you, and they will send more charges tumbling down to seek you out. It is a vicious game, a war of taut nerves, when water becomes the enemy instead of the protector and a single cry can seal your death warrant.