Freedom of the Mask

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Vashing of the hogs!” Dahlgren sneered, but no one looked up from the prayer.

  “So…we pray to Thee now…do what Thy will. We beg Thee to be merciful and to prepare a place in Paradise for all…especially these children…these young innocents…these lambs in dire need of a shepherd. If Thy will is so…take us all into Thy hands and deliver us to the realm of Heaven, where we might find peace…believers and unbelievers alike. It is this I sincerely ask, as Thy friend and child upon this earth…as Thy servant and exhalter. By Thy grace, Amen.”

  “Amen,” said some of the others.

  Dahlgren laughed harshly.

  His servant spoke.

  “Great house,” he said.

  He spoke the two words like a man who’d been struck, had been dazed and lost, himself wandering a dark wilderness, and who had just seen a glimmer of light through the tangled trees.

  Matthew Corbett pressed his free hand against his forehead, for it seemed his brain was bruised. The ship went up, slammed down, the timbers shrieked, the water swept through, but suddenly the young man was an immovable object, and though at the end of his rope he held firm, and indeed something within himself began to climb back.

  He had wondered so many things since starting this voyage with the monster who had murdered his wife, Quinn…or, who said she was his wife. And this man, this Prussian count who had slashed Quinn’s throat right in front of him, said he was not Daniel Tate but was instead someone named Corbett, and that he did not belong in Rotbottom, but that a man Dahlgren called Professor Fell in England would receive him with open arms and explain everything to his satisfaction. But why did Quinn have to die, and if he wasn’t her husband Daniel then how had he gotten to Rotbottom? It was all mixed up, it was pain upon pain and a center of blankness. Why did he have such strange thoughts that streaked through his mind like comets, leaving blazing images that just as quickly faded away?

  Who was the woman who appeared to be in a filthy gaol cell, and dropping her hooded cloak she stood naked to the world and defiantly said, Here is the witch…?

  Who was a girl named Berry, for that name kept coming to him, and brief glimpses of her face as if seen only through frosted glass? And there was something about birds…hawks, maybe they were, and it was a fearful thing but he could make no sense of it.

  Who was the man with him in the cold water at the bottom of a well, and the second man with a patchwork beard standing looking down, and his laugh like a slow funeral bell?

  A girl that he somehow knew was of the Iroquois tribe sitting nude upon a rock at sea…two orange-haired brothers, devils both, but their names were gone…a massive explosion, and a burning wagon falling from the sky…a deadly swamp, and what appeared to be skeleton-men playing sport with human heads…

  What did all that mean?

  And one of the strangest things was that he knew a great deal about a sailing ship. He knew the difference between a cat’s-head and a topgallant, a holystone and a gaff-rig; he knew the system of bells that kept time for the watch, though Peppertree failed to follow them with the same military precision as had Captain Falco. Of this he was somehow certain…but who was Captain Falco? A name that had come to him one day out of the mists, as had the girl’s name Berry? He never recalled being at sea before, so…another mystery, among a multitude of them.

  But the time for answering those questions was not of the moment; the problem to be solved, and quickly, was how to save this ship and all aboard.

  The great house of the Lord, he thought.

  The great house.

  The greathouse.

  Greathouse.

  Why did those two words, put together, make him think that he was able to get out of this hold, face that storm and try to save himself and these people? Not only that…but he thought that even with the odds against him, he had a good chance of doing so.

  Think! he told himself, as the ship pitched and fell, rolled and groaned and the water streamed over him and the others. Those two words…no, no…not just any two words…oh, his brain was hurting…not just two words…no…a name.

  “If this ship is to be saved,” he suddenly spoke up, already beating by three words the longest sentence he’d uttered to anyone on this voyage, “we’re going to have to do it.”

  “Us?” said Noble Jahns’ one-legged father. “I don’t know a damn thing ’bout seacraft!”

  “None of us do!” Briarfield’s shrill voice was made even sharper and more shrill by his terror. “We’re all landlubbers!”

  “We’ve got to get up to the deck!” Matthew said. “Tie down every heavy rope we can find and throw them over! Let them trail in the water!”

  “For what purpose?” the blacksmith asked.

  “Slowing the ship down. The ropes will help that, and give us stability. If we can get the port and starboard anchors dropped, so much the—” He was interrupted by another slam and crash of prow against waves and whoosh of the sea rushing through the compartment. “Better,” he finished when he could breathe again.

  “No one’s going up there!” said Briarfield, whose sharp-chinned face had taken on the color and sheen of spoiled cheese. “And you…you’re nothing but a servant! You don’t know anything about ships! Jesus Christ, what you’re suggesting may well sink us!”

  “I know this tub can’t take much more! We can’t just stay here and wait for it to break up!” When no one responded, Matthew said, “I’ll do it myself, then!”

  “Ohhhhhh, no!” It was the harsh voice of Count Dahlgren. “You are not going anyvhere! You are too waluable to me, to be lost in such a folly!”

  Matthew despised the man. Not only was Dahlgren a murderer, he was filthy in his habits and expected his “servant” to wait upon him as if he had been elevated to the status of emperor. He had sworn to someday kill Dahlgren for Quinn’s murder, but he had to stay his hand to find out who the enigmatic Professor Fell was, and what this person knew about his history.

  In the meantime he had no intention of waiting here like a trapped bilge rat. The ship heeled violently and the women and children screamed but not as wildly as Grantham Briarfield. There was a sick instant when Matthew was certain the masts must be touching wavetops, and then with the noise of bursting timbers the Wanderer fought back. After the next wave smashed through, Matthew took the lamp from Hezekiah Montgomery. “I’m going,” he said, but before he made two unsteady steps on this nautical nightmare Count Dahlgren was upon him.

  “I said, nein!” Dahlgren hooked his good arm around his servant’s throat. “You are svept off, and vhere does this leave me?”

  “Let him go.”

  “Vhat?”

  “Let him go,” Randolph repeated. “If he’s got guts enough to go out on this deck…by God, I do too. That trick with the ropes…it might steady us!”

  “He is my property! I say vhat he does and does not do!”

  “I’ll go,” said Montgomery. “If I’m going to drown, it won’t be inside a ship!”

  “I’ll go,” the one-legged old man said with a fierce intensity, but Noble Jahns shook his head. “I’m with ye,” the farmer said to Randolph. “Pa, you’re stickin’ here to look out for the fam’ly. No arguments, now!”

  “Yes,” said Fanning, who gave his lamp to Jahns’ father. “Take my light.”

  “Either let him go or come with us,” Randolph said to Dahlgren. “We’ll need all the hands we can get!” He didn’t look at Briarfield, who had moved as far away from the light as he could.

  “I say again…nein! I vill not haff—oh, Jesu!”

  The next blood-curdling pitch and fall of the Wanderer had loosened Dahlgren’s grip on Matthew, and the blast of water from the deck was strong enough to part master from servant.

  “Let’s get to it!” Randolph said to Matthew when he could speak again. He led the way out of the hold and into the flooded passageway with Matthew right behind him, followed by Jahns, Fanning and Montgomery.

  Amid floating dead chickens and a pig
swimming for its life, water-soaked boards that served as risers led up to a hatch set flush with the deck. The hatch had been hastily secured with a leather cord, but the sea was pouring in through every possible crack; it occurred to Matthew that neither Captain Peppertree nor his crew had ever heard of pitch or tar. A knife drawn from a sheath at Randolph’s belt made quick work of the leather, and pushing the hatch upward and open the blacksmith was the first to step out into the whirlwinds. He was nearly blown out of his boots, and whether it was rain or seaspray that was crossing the deck in torrents made no matter; it was going to take strength, fortitude and just plain luck to even crawl on this pitching bitch without being thrown into the Atlantic.

  When Matthew emerged he too was hit by the wind and water and he skidded several yards before he could grab hold of a rope. The deck was a tangle of lines, collapsed shrouds, and debris that had been torn loose. The lid of a toolbox had been battered open and its contents expelled. Several mallets, a couple of handsaws, some hatchets and a full-sized axe were underfoot for the taking, if such might be useful for the task. What caught Matthew’s attention and held it, though, was the vista of mountainous black waves around them, under a dark violet sky through which it seemed a half-dozen whips of lightning flared at any given second. One instant the ship was rising with frightening speed toward the summits and the next it turned bowsprit down and slid into the canyons between them, with a thunder of water crashing over the prow, a shuddering and eerie groaning of distressed hull and masts, and a smash of water over the small figures that gripped onto any handhold to keep the deck beneath them.

  Matthew’s nerve faltered. He was on his knees, gripping desperately to a line. A wall of seafoam that felt as hard as church bricks struck him in the face and pounded his skull. The world was a black-and-purple tumult and a shriek of storm and vessel. I can’t do this! he thought, as the terror flailed within him. No…no…I can’t!

  But then, in his mind, that name again: Greathouse. Yes, he was sure it was a name. Whoever it belonged to was strong, he thought. Whoever it belonged to…a man…yes…a man who would get up off his knees and do what he had to do, no matter if it cost him his life. And whoever it was, he would expect the same. It was not that Greathouse was without fear; it was that fear did not rule him, and however he went down he would go down fighting. Of this, Matthew was very sure.

  He was not Greathouse, but whoever Matthew was—husband to Quinn, servant to Dahlgren, lost soul bound for either death at sea or an audience with Professor Fell in England—he had to stand up now, put on his big-boy boots and do what had to be done.

  He was aware of the blurred figures of Randolph, Fanning and Jahns making their way aft, staggering hither and yon. Montgomery’s head appeared in the hatch but his nerve must’ve collapsed because after only a few seconds he retreated, and he closed the hatch to seal his shame in with him.

  Matthew got up. The wind pushed and pulled him at the same time. It caught him at the knees and hit him in the chest. He clung to whatever woodwork or lines he could find as he struggled aft, one moment climbing a mountain, the next trying to keep from sliding over a cliff. When he reached the others he found that Randolph had broken open one of the rope lockers and he and Jahns were pulling out the thicker mooring lines. Other ropes of various thicknesses lay about in tangles. Fanning was at work tying one of these to a cleat, his back braced against the storm. Matthew reached him between waves and helped him toss all sixty feet of the rope over the side, so the first line was in the water. Randolph and Jahns got one of the hawsers tied up, and there was an anxious moment when a wave swept in with tremendous force from starboard and nearly carried both men over the side but for the blacksmith’s strength in holding them. The hawser went over the stern, and the two men started tying up a second heavy rope while Matthew and Fanning concentrated on securing and throwing over as many smaller ropes as they could gather.

  “You are coming vith me!”

  A hand with a crooked wrist grabbed the collar of Matthew’s shirt. Water streamed from Dahlgren’s hair over the vulpine angles of his face. “Come now!” he shouted, and pulled his servant away from the rope he’d been working on with Fanning.

  “Leave me alone!” Matthew shouted back. “We’ve got to finish this!”

  “You are finished!” said Dahlgren. He then lifted the club-like wooden belaying-pin he’d picked up from the deck and struck Matthew a hard blow across the left side of his skull, very near the temple.

  Matthew collapsed, his head full of fire. Darkness overwhelmed him.

  “Are you insane?” Fanning yelled. “He’s trying to save this—”

  “Shut your mouth, you pious pigfucker!” Dahlgren hooked his bad arm around Matthew’s chest and began dragging him toward the open hatch. Before he reached it, a sizzling bright bolt of lightning that forked into six spears before it plunged into the sea showed him the gargantuan wave that was bearing down on the unlucky Wanderer. It was a black monster, a leviathan of waves, topped with a white crest of boiling foam and shot through with streaks of iridescent green, deep blue and slate gray. Dahlgren realized he would not reach the hatch. He dropped Matthew and scrambled to find a handhold on something solid, at the same time as Fanning saw the wave and shouted for the others to brace themselves.

  It lifted the ship on high, balanced it there for a heart-stopping few seconds…and then dashed the vessel down, down and down into a seething valley. The sea crashed over the prow with demonic force, splintering the bowsprit and tearing most of the figurehead away. The upper third of the mainmast snapped and fell overboard. The water picked up the body of the unconscious young man and tossed him like a boneless poppet, and being unconscious most likely saved his neck; in the next instant he was thrown back to the deck and pushed along by the rush of the sea until his left shoulder and the left side of his head struck the rough surface of the starboard bulwark, hitting very near to where the Count’s belaying-pin had fallen.

  Almost half-drowned, Dahlgren crawled over the debris toward Matthew, who lay like one dead. “Get up!” Dahlgren commanded, for he could see that at least his prize was still breathing. He staggered to his own feet and pulled at one of Matthew’s arms. “Get up, damn you!” There was no reaction. Dahlgren looked over his shoulder, terrified lest another beast of a wave smash him down. He heard Matthew begin coughing; he saw the young man shudder and convulse and with an effort get up on hands and knees, and then Matthew began to retch out what seemed a bucket of seawater.

  “Up!” Dahlgren said, and again there was no reaction but coughing and retching. He reached down to get his arm around Matthew, haul him up and drag him to the hatch. And then Matthew’s head turned and the eyes opened, and blood had burst from the nostrils and the eyes too were reddened while his face had gone ghost-white and the lips gray.

  “You,” he said, more of a croak than speech. One hand came up to touch his left temple, and try to soothe the pulsing pain there. And quite suddenly, as if a veil had been torn away or a fog lifted, he remembered everything…not only what had happened since the murderer Griffin Royce had slammed him in the head with an oar…but everything of the past and present…Hudson Greathouse…Berry Grigsby…Captain Falco of the ship Nightflyer that had delivered himself and Berry from Professor Fell’s Pendulum Island…Minx Cutter…Madam Herrald…the agency…everything. And though his head was killing him and his vision seemed to fade in and out, he knew exactly who this mongrel was beside him, exactly where he was and why. “You’re not…” He tried it again, because his tongue was a heavy weight. “You’re not…taking me to Professor Fell, you foul piece of shit.”

  Four

  AT this center of the storm, another maelstrom threatened.

  “I remember,” Matthew gasped, still woozy from two blows to the head. The next thing he said he was able to shout over the roar of the wind. “I know who I am!” Perhaps the most important five words he’d ever shouted in his life. He hauled himself up by clinging onto a hanging mass of
shrouds and looked defiantly into Dahlgren’s face. “I said I’d kill you! So…when we get to England…the first thing I’m going to do is make sure you’re arrested and hanged for the murder of Quinn Tate!”

  Dahlgren also reached for support into the hanging lines, as the ship shuddered beneath their feet and rain thrashed their faces. “Ist das so?” The realization of Matthew’s condition sank in. “A regretful situation,” he said, and he glanced quickly aft where the others were still occupied throwing out the ropes. The Wanderer was yet bucking up and down at the whim of the sea, but it had steadied somewhat and was not heeling so dangerously to port or starboard. Dahlgren gave a thin, tight smile but his eyes were dead. “I no longer haff use for you, do I?”

  “Smile all you please! I’ll have you locked in the brig as soon as—”

  An arm went around Matthew’s throat with choking force. The Prussian braced himself to bodily throw the young problem-solver from New York over the side.

  The Wanderer had been lifted up on a wave and now it sank rapidly into a green trough. The water that crashed over the damaged prow and flooded across the deck was not what saved Matthew’s skin; it was the dozens of silver flying fish that exploded out of that wave, and struck at both the struggling men in a flurry of vibrating fins and tails.

  In that miniature silver hurricane, Matthew fought free. He slipped on flopping fish and went down on the deck, and Dahlgren turned toward him with rage contorting his face and a flying fish caught for an instant in the tangle of his beard. Then Dahlgren saw something that suited his purpose, and he plucked up the axe that had been broken out of the toolbox.