The Night Boat

by Robert R. McCammon

  The black with the knife was moving in; Moore caught a glimpse of enraged eyes, a flash of metal. The knife arm went back in a short, brutal arc, poised for an instant, and started to drive home through Moore’s rib cage.

  There was a blur of motion and bodies, an abrupt cry of pain; a piece of timber came crashing down across the head of the man with the knife, and he groaned in agony as he toppled forward, the knife spinning from his grip.

  The timber swung out, caught another man in the chest, and drove him to his knees. They all stood back from Moore, breathing heavily.

  Cheyne held the jagged piece of wood ready to strike again. His gaze flickered across the maddened faces; then he said quietly to Moore, “Step away from them.”

  Moore, nursing his throbbing shoulder, moved nearer the Carib. Knives glittered around them.

  “Come on,” Cheyne muttered defiantly. “Let’s make short work of it.”

  One of the men, larger than the others, stepped from the group, a broken bottle gripped in a hamlike hand; another followed close behind. But a sharp click! froze them in their tracks.

  “I swear before God I’ll shoot the first one of you who lays a hand on those two men,” Kip said, holding a rifle into their midst. There were sunken hollows beneath his eyes and he blinked sluggishly, fighting exhaustion. Behind him stood Myra, her clothes dirty and a bandage wrapped around one arm; she held their little girl, Mindy, whose eyes were glazed in shock. “Do any of you think this is going to bring back a wife, a child, or a husband? If we start killing each other we’ll be finishing the job those things began…!”

  The men watched Kip, their faces still eager for revenge.

  “There’s nothing you can do now,” he told them. “They’re gone…”

  “AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?” It was Reynard, struggling through the knot of men, sweat shining on his face. “You’re the law here, there must be something you can do, some way you can…”

  “When the weather clears we can use the radio to get help,” Kip said calmly. “Until then, no.”

  Reynard shook his head. “That’s not enough! Look at these people, mon! Look at those bodies on the ground! What we going to do if they come back? How we going to fight?”

  “Here are your friends,” Cheyne said to Moore. “See them as they are.” He raised his voice. “I’ll tell you how we’ll fight, old man! I’m going to sea after the boat; I’m going to try to run it across Jacob’s Teeth.” He glanced at Moore and said with grudging respect, “And this man’s going with me.”

  Kip looked over his shoulder at the Carib, then at Moore. “Jacob’s Teeth? Then you think it’s moving toward Jamaica?”

  “Maybe,” Cheyne answered. “It’s the fastest route into the heart of the sea lanes. If we’ve guessed wrong, or if we’re too late, we won’t have another chance to find it.”

  “You won’t make it, Cheyne,” Kip said. “There’s no way you can…”

  “And what else are we to do?” The Carib glowered at him. “Let that goddamned thing slip away, maybe to return here and do this again? They know our weaknesses now, and they know where to find diesel fuel for their boat. They’ll get into the sea lanes and if they do…no. I won’t have that on my conscience. This time they didn’t attack Caribville, but once a long time ago I remember the scream of the shells and burning Caribs crawling through ashes. No! I won’t let them get away! Not this time! Not ever again!” He glanced at Moore. “I’ve waited long enough. If you don’t come with me now I’m leaving you behind!” He turned and began walking back to the harbor.

  Moore paused for a moment, looking into Kip’s face. “I’ve got to help him,” he said. “There’s no other way.”

  “Just you two alone?”

  “And Jana Thornton.”

  Kip stared at him, shook his head, looked back at the islanders. The fear and sickness had overtaken them again, driving out the lust for violence. Reynard staggered back through the group of men, muttering wildly. “I…can’t think anymore,” he said in a strained voice. “I don’t know what I should do.” He stood there for a moment, his shoulders sagged; he drew a hand across his face and stared down as if he might find an answer in the ashes.

  Kip’s eyes flickered. He looked around until he saw a face he knew. “J.R., you’ll be in charge until we return. Here. The keys to my office. There are guns up there if you need them. Clear away as many of these people as you can from the harbor, get them up to the clinic. David, can we use your hotel as shelter?”

  Moore nodded.

  “Then that’s settled.” He turned back to J.R. “Get as many as you can up there. The storm’s not far away, from the looks of that sky. Just get them in out of the wind.” Kip turned to his wife and clutched her hand. “Go on. You’ll be all right. Hurry.”

  She hesitated, clinging to him; he called another woman’s name and she came over to lead Myra away from her husband. “Remember,” he said to J.R. before handing him the rifle. “Make sure these people get in some shelter.”

  Kip and Moore made their way silently along Front Street; they could hear the racket of the trawler’s engines, and Cheyne shouting at some boys to help him throw off his bow lines. “I’ve been trying to raise someone on the radio for the past two hours,” Kip explained. “I’ve just been getting fragments from ships at sea. There’s a godawful blow working out there somewhere.”

  “You don’t have to come with us. Coquina’s your responsibility and that’s all.”

  Kip shook his head. “I know that boat is still out there, David. And I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t try—at least try—to stop it before it takes its evil elsewhere. There’ll be more killing, and more innocent people will die. If I turn my back on that I turn my back on everything I’ve ever believed in.”

  They reached the boat where Cheyne was already hauling in the lines, Jana working right beside him. The Carib stared at Kip for a few seconds but said nothing.

  Moore climbed aboard and helped the Carib and Jana with the bow lines; Cheyne then disappeared into the wheelhouse and the trawler began to move toward Kiss Bottom’s passage, its diesels rumbling.

  The ocean became a shifting plain of blacks and whites around the trawler. The waves lifted them and then dropped them into liquid, glassine pits that shimmered like a thousand eyes. Foam broke over the trawler’s prow, streaming along the deck and through the scuppers. Moore, at the bow watching for bommies, looked to the sky. It was a forbidding, featureless mass of grays and yellows. As they swung in a northeasterly course, black, thick clouds loomed in the distance, closing off the horizon, making it a vast, empty doorway.

  He turned to look back at Coquina, a mass of green against the gray. Then a cresting wave, streaked with weed, rose up and blocked his view. They were through the passage, moving across the deep Abyss, the sea striking up underneath the hull.

  And with a cold shudder he realized what that horizon was.

  A doorway, yawning wide.

  A doorway into the realm of the dead.

  He made his way aft, clinging to the gunwale, past Kip and into the wheelhouse.

  Twenty-four

  “BAD WEATHER AHEAD,” Cheyne said grimly, the muscles standing out on his forearms with the effort of handling the wheel. Timbers creaked the length of the boat; water struck the windshield with a noise like a handclap. Though the wind had quieted, the sea was rising. A bad sign.

  The sea was being churned into a frenzy further ahead, nearer Jamaica. They weren’t moving fast enough, although Cheyne knew that the waves would be holding the U-boat back as well.

  Cheyne let the Pride run for openings through the waves, seeking smoother water before the foam crashed back and closed the holes; there was a strong current thrashing that wanted to take the rudder and spin the boat broadside. Cheyne cherished the Pride like a strong, responsive woman. He had built this boat with his own hands, with lumber stolen from Langstree’s yard and salvaged engine parts. He’d captained the craft for seven years
, using it to fish with a Carib crew. She was a fine, fast boat, with a good balance. He kept his attention focused directly ahead, at times checking a compass and a brass barometer mounted on the panel before him. The glass was low and still falling.

  “The sea can pound hell out of the U-boat,” Jana said, “and it’ll keep right on going because of the way it’s built, low to the water. There’s no capsizing it.”

  “All those years,” Kip said to Moore, “those things were working to put the boat back to sea…maybe they’d been maintaining the engines as best they could even when they were on the bottom. All that time with a single purpose. A desire to strike back, a burning hate and need.” He’d related everything Boniface had said.

  “U-boat crewmen were trained to improve,” Jana told him. “They used whatever was at hand—wires, cables, pieces of timber, even the bulkhead iron. There are documented cases of submarines being raised from the bottom after several days—just before their air gave out for good—due to the sheer guts and ingenuity of the crewmen. In some ways I think they must have been the bravest of all warriors.”

  “The Night Boat,” Kip whispered to himself from where he stood at the rear of the wheelhouse, an arm hooked around a beam. He felt weary and battered, and he wondered what he would have done if his fears had been realized, if Myra and Mindy had been killed. When he’d seen that blood on the wall of his house, his world had begun to collapse. Two of the horrors had broken in and one had slashed his daughter with a claw, but Myra had fought them off with the rifle and had run to the village with Mindy in her arms. There she’d found more of the things, and they would have killed her in the street had a group of men not appeared through the smoke and held them back. She’d remembered Langstree, she’d told Kip, beating at the things with an iron pipe before he was dragged into their midst. Myra had found refuge in the grocery’s cellar, along with a few other men and women. The things had almost ripped away the overhead trapdoor, but then the grocery had caught fire and they had scurried away, fearful of the flames. Myra and the others had barely gotten out before the burning roof had collapsed.

  “God,” Kip said aloud, shaking off the terrible memory of her story. “What if it’s taken another passage, moved toward Trinidad, or Haiti, or even the States? You said you’d force the boat onto Jacob’s Teeth if you could catch it, Cheyne. I want to know how.”

  Cheyne didn’t turn his head. He watched the storm curtain thickening. “When the time comes,” he said. “I’ll find it, all right. It’s not through with me, just as I’m not through with it.”

  “Why?” Moore asked, moving alongside Cheyne and supporting himself against the instrumentation panel. “I’ve seen the hate and the fear in you. How did it get there?”

  “I think,” Cheyne responded, light glinting off his golden amulet, “you see too much, Moore.” He paused a moment, as if weighing a decision. Then he nodded and spoke: “I have a nightmare, Moore. It won’t let me be. I can’t free myself of it. I am in a room, lying on the bare frame of a bed. I’m a child, and I know nothing of terror or the evil in man because my world is enclosed by the huge cathedral of the sea and sky. I lie in a darkened room and I listen to the nightbirds. But then they’re silent, and there’s another noise. A thin wailing noise that comes closer and closer, but I cannot escape. And then the noise is all around me, hot and screaming. There is no way to get out of that room.

  “I see a crack zigzag across the ceiling; I see the ceiling fall to pieces just as the rain of hot metal and fire pours through. Something jagged strikes my head and I try to scream but I have no voice. I cup my own blood in my hands, and the blood is bubbling. And then the pain. White hot. Unendurable. God, the pain…” Tiny beads of sweat had risen on his forehead.

  “I can smell myself burning, in this nightmare, and no one can help me because they can’t reach me beneath the flaming timbers. And then darkness, a long terrible darkness. Finally there are people in white who tell me to rest. I lie in a green-walled room without mirrors. But one day I struggle up from my bed and I catch a glimpse of something reflected in the window glass. A monstrous face wrapped in yellowed bandages, shriveled and distorted, peering back, the swollen eyes widening. I smash my hand through the glass because I am afraid of what I see. I want to destroy that creature because I know someday its vision will destroy me. This is no longer the face of a man, but the face of anacri, a demon; and what is inside is no longer bravery but doglike cowardice.”

  Cheyne glanced at Moore; his face was drawn tight, the sweat standing out in relief. “When the Nazis shelled Caribville from their boat, my house was the first hit. My mother was driven to the edge of madness. You saw her. My father and a few of the others armed themselves with rifles and harpoons and went out in a small fishing boat to seek the monster. And that was the last I saw of him. The creatures in that Hell-spawned boat took away my life, Moore. They took away something good and replaced it with part of themselves; they’re still reaching for me, in each hour of my waking, in every moment of my sleep. They keep returning to rip pieces of my soul away, and they won’t stop until they have the all of me. I fear them as no man ever feared anything on this earth, Moore. Even now I tremble and sweat, and I despise myself for it. To a Carib, courage is life, and if I die as a coward my soul will never find peace.”

  He paused a moment, licked his lips, his eyes judging the width of the sea’s corridors. “I left Caribville for ten years; I went to South America and worked as a hand on one of the coffee plantations in Brazil, later in the Colombia stone quarries, where I learned how to blast rock with dynamite. I was shunned and cursed by all as a symbol of bad luck, as a man with two faces, one good, the other twisted. A British woman was my only friend—the widow of a freighter captain killed in a wreck, who lived near the quarries and worked as a cook for the men. She was maybe twenty years older than me; she showed an interest, taught me how to read and write.

  “When I returned to Coquina to take on my responsibilities as Chief Father I knew I wasn’t fit for the position. But someone had to do it, and I have the royal blood. For years, I managed to lead my people as best I could. I tried to exert some influence, tried to change enough of the old ways to allow us to live in peace with the white man. But then one day, as I stood on the point, I saw that huge boat rise from the Abyss. I trembled as I watched. The rage, the fear, the weakness: All of it flooded over me again. I forced myself to go down to the boatyard. I stood outside the shelter for a long time, but I couldn’t make myself cross the threshold. In my arms I held a crate of dynamite: I was going to blow it to pieces. Instead I ran from that place, shaking like a cur. If I had destroyed it that night, if I had set the caps and fuses and lit them, none of what’s happened on Coquina would have come about. There is much on my soul now. But I have a last chance. One last chance to find them, to destroy them before they slip away. I don’t know if I can. But by God…by God, I must try.”

  The men were silent for a long time. Then Kip said, “Where’d you get that crate of dynamite?”

  “When they were building their hotel and marina,” Cheyne said. “We stole it from them by the crateload and hid it in a shack out in the jungle. Most of it’s rotted now, but there’s still some fit for use.”

  Ahead the sky was a mass of rolling clouds, yellow with black, swollen underbellies. The sea thundered against the hull, bursting around the bow and making the entire boat shudder. Cheyne pointed at the radio receiver. “Moore, see what you can pick up on that.”

  Moore switched it on and turned the dial; there was nothing but the loud crackle and blare of static. A voice faded in, then evaporated. The trawler was being rocked from side to side, the noise of a giant’s fist pounding the keel. Moore turned away from the radio and looked toward Jana. “You should be back on Coquina,” he told her.

  “I can make it,” she said. “I’ve spent most of my life researching sunken wrecks, U-boats, and otherwise. Now, to see a boat like this one come back to life, riding the high seas…it ma
y be evil, yes, it may destroy us…but I have to see it.”

  Moore shook his head. “You’re either a fool or the gutsiest damn woman I ever met.” Something in her eyes kept him from saying anything else, although he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was. There seemed to be a thin wall of mist between them, as lazy and serpentine as the deep Caribbean tides. He wanted to reach through, to pierce it with his fingers, to lay a hand against her cheek and feel the warmth of her flesh coursing through him. He was glad they were together but was deeply afraid for her as well. She was a beautiful woman, filled with life and hope, and he did not even attempt to raise his hand to reach for her. He knew it couldn’t be. What was that about being of two different worlds? One of them was dark, the other light, and she was not part of what lay before him.

  “Bommies ahead,” Cheyne said quietly.

  Moore turned to look; Kip joined them.

  The sea just beyond was a boiling maelstrom of black. When the waters parted for an instant Moore caught the glimpse of the green and brown hooks of a surface-grazing reef. Cheyne twisted the wheel to starboard, and as he did a wave struck the side, shaking them roughly. He brought the wheel back quickly, and began to zigzag through the waves that now lifted in all directions, swamping the foredeck and streaming through the scuppers. Something scraped noisily along the port side, just below the waterline. Cheyne hissed the breath out between his teeth. “We’re in the midst of it,” he said. “I need a watch at the bow.” He eased back on the throttles, cutting his speed.

  Moore glanced over. “I’ll go,” he said.

  “There’s a coil of rope on the flooring back there. Tie it around your waist good and tight. Kip, you take the other end of it and do the same. When Moore goes out that doorway you hold yourself firm to one of those beams and let him have slack real slow. Keep the rope taut between you.”

  Kip helped Moore secure the rope, then slipped the other end beneath his arms and knotted it around his chest. “Be damned careful out there, David,” he said, raising his voice over the noise of the sea.