The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  “You will drink the salt,” the dead man said. “It will help for a while, and then it will drive you mad.”

  Then it was not the Gunner beside him on the ropes, but the Governor, large as life. He had his pistol on his hand, same as he’d had on the Zong. Swift felt like laughing at the man, just as he had all those years ago. You did not threaten a slave ship sailor with a quick death. They’d lost all fear of such things. It was the slow death and the slow pain they feared. The thirst, the pickling, the sharks.

  “Water,” someone croaked above him. It was the Malay maid. She dangled the coat to him. Swift took it from her and wrapped it around his shoulders, for his hands were losing their grip. He descended the ratlines slowly, step by step, stepping carefully around the living and the dead.

  The sea was calm. The boy lay stretched out on the quarter deck. Swift shook him, and he stirred.

  “You should climb,” Swift said. “The waves will wash you away in the next gale.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Swift,” the boy said, “I do not think I have the strength for it.”

  Swift looked up at the rigging. The numbness in his muscles told him he did not have the strength to pull the boy up. But he grabbed the boy under his arms, and, leaning his weight back, managed to pull him to the rail. The stars overhead made fantastic patchworks of light. They reminded Swift of the Saint Elme’s fire that had danced on board, warning the sailors of their deaths. Such a beautiful thing, he thought in wonder. So beautiful.

  He eased out his rope belt and lashed the boy to the quarter deck rail. Then he lowered the coat into the sea. He dribbled some drops of salt water into the boy’s mouth. Lowering his own head to the deck, Swift lapped at the waves like an animal. The wetness in his mouth shocked him with a relief that surged through his body.

  Then he saw the haunt.

  It lay two points abaft the port beam, an eerie shine on the ocean. Its tendrils were out again, touching the water so delicately it resembled one of those strange underwater flowers that bloom and curl in foreign tide pools. It was feeding off the men on the raft, he supposed. Or was that something the Gunner had told him?

  Swift soaked the coat in salt water and placed it on his back. The precious water cut icy pathways across his shoulders as he climbed, finding every groove in his shrinking body and pinching him with cold. Still he climbed, and at the crow’s nest he handed the three women who’d taken refuge there the sodden coat. They sucked at it eagerly.

  “Will we die soon, do you think?” Mrs. Newman’s eyes had sunken so far it was almost a peeling skull Swift looked into, and not a face.

  “Don’t worry,” he told them. “It will all be over soon.”

  But it wasn’t.

  The living and the dead lay side by side on the ropes. The thick, sweet smell of death lay over everything.

  Swift climbed up and down the rigging, wetting the coat and passing it to those too weak to move. The boy was still alive. He could tell by the way his limbs quivered when the waves washed over them, though Swift could no longer detect the sound of breath when he dribbled water into the corner of the boy’s mouth.

  In the evening, when the air began to cool, Swift went in search of survivors. He grabbed the bodies he passed on the shrouds. He patted their bloated arms, their naked, festering legs. No one moved. They were as still as if painted, upon a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

  Mrs. Newman’s swollen body sat upright, looking expectantly ahead. From time to time Swift followed her gaze, trying to make out what she saw.

  “Well,” the Governor said. “What will it be, men? To die of thirst’s a cruel death.” He gestured again with that foolish pistol of his. The Zong’s crew stared back at him. They’d been working on less than a quart of water since entering the Torrid Zone. The rainwater casks that loomed so lovely behind the governor’s pistol were never for the likes of them, and they knew it.

  “A vote,” the first mate said. “A vote on this.” The first mate despised them all, Swift could tell.

  “What’s the captain say?”

  “Captain Collingwood’s sick abed,” the governor said. “And Kelsall’s been taken out of the chain of command. The situation is clear. The cargo must be jettisoned. Not all—only the sick and the dying. Collingwood has given me his list.”

  “For your insurance monies, you want the cargo jettisoned. That’s murder, sir,” said the first mate. “I’ll have no part in it.”

  “A vote,” the boatswain said. “We must have a vote.”

  Silence on the Zong. A parched boat on a parched ocean.

  “Who votes ‘yea?’” the governor asked. He raised his own hand and looked meaningfully around. A few of the officers hesitantly raised their arms in the air.

  “If you vote yea,” the governor said, “I’ll see to it that every tar here gets a cup of water in his ration.”

  Swift raised his hand.

  Listen: there was a ship. She was called the Zong. She was low on water, or so they said. Part of her cargo needed to be jettisoned, or so they said. Her cargo was a collection of humans in chains.

  They pushed the women and children out one by one, through the cabin portholes. The first ones went quietly enough, but the others struggled. The slaves could hear the screaming as it drifted through the hold. They understood they were going to die. You have no idea how much even a sick child can fight you when she knows you are dragging her to her death.

  The governor kept pointing. This one, he said. That one. They took the healthy along with the sick. The governor couldn’t read, Kelsall said, so what was the point of a list?

  Some of the tars joined in. This one. A woman scratched Swift’s arm as he reached for her chain-mate, so he grabbed her by the hair. This one.

  It is no great thing to drown a slave or two, when they are sick, when they have caused trouble. It is a usual thing.

  They jettisoned fifty-four the first day. The governor said the number should be noted down, for the insurance claim. 54.

  The next day they marched the men up to the quarter-deck, this time with the chains and shackles still on. They’d fight less that way, the governor said. And the chains would drag them down quicker. 42.

  They had to stop for a time, to see to the sails. One of the Negroes had some English; he said all in the hold were begging to live, promising to survive on no meat and no water until port. 38. Ten women committed suicide, leaping from the deck to join those in the waves below. 48. One man managed to climb back aboard. They kicked him from the netting, into the screaming ocean. 144 in all. Or maybe more? Despite the governor’s efforts, they’d lost count halfway through.

  A usual thing. The descent into the stinking hold, the lash with the cat, the feel of a man’s arm resisting as you haul him forward, the shouts, the crying, the pleas. Usual things. Save that first day, when Swift rushed above, because the stench of the hold was getting to him, that was all, and he rested his burning arms on the gunwale, and saw. A pregnant woman, giving birth in the waves.

  “I did not pass the whisper,” Swift told the boy. “Someone else did. I don’t know who. Before the second trial, one of the Gregson men found me on a dock, told me, ‘We know you’re a fine man, we know you’ll remember what’s good for you.’ But they never called me to testify. Not one of the seventeen crew were called. I never did get to find out what kind of man I was.” He raised his hand to scratch one of the scabs beneath his eyes, and noticed, idly, that his fingernail had fallen off. He did not remember losing it.

  The boy’s corpse was swollen. Its swollen limbs still floated every time a wave washed in. In and out.

  “There was a ship,” Swift said to himself, trying out the words.

  The sun stared down.

  Swift waited patiently as the haunt approached. On inspection, he agreed with Mrs. Newman, that it might not be a ship at all. The haunt had the general look of a ship—the hull, the masts, the sails—but its cobweb gauziness confused his gaze. He could not figure how
such a thing could sail. He supposed he’d soon learn.

  The haunt was selective in the corpses it chose. It paused over one body, then took the one beside it, lifting it into the air in a slow arc. One of the corpses it pulled from the rigging fell to pieces, a torn limb splashing into the darkness. The haunt continued its delicate search, serene.

  When one of its glowing tendrils passed near him Swift stiffened—some part of him still wanted to live—but then he forced himself to relax. He no longer had the strength to fight it, if he ever had.

  The tendril brushed over his shoulder, a prickle of heat and light. It had a dry, horrid smell, like burning bone. The tendril drifted over to the boy, wrapped itself around his torso, lifted him up. Swift’s knots held—he was proud of that—but another tendril arced out of the sky, ripping the rope away. The boy was carried aloft.

  The haunt’s light faded, its too-white glare dimming to the muted color of the moon. Its graceful tendrils curled back to the ship like the closing petals of a flower. Slowly, relentlessly, it turned away from the Minerva.

  “No,” Swift said. This last outrage was too much. “You don’t get to leave me here. I’m the last one living, aren’t I? The Jonah?” He expected the ship would turn back at the sound of his voice, but the haunt sailed on. It retreated with surprising speed into the darkness.

  Cold flooded Swift’s body. They could not leave him here.

  “Come back!” The words were hard to force through his parched mouth. He threw himself on his belly, scrabbled forward to the water’s edge, palmed in water to wet his tongue.

  “Come back!” His voice was louder now. They’d surely hear him.

  Darkness wrapped itself around him. He could not see the haunt at all.

  Swift lay alone on the rotting deck, alone in the silent sea. He sometimes thought he heard the dead conversing above him, but he could not make out their words.

  He expected them to return, the dead. Surely they’d come back. Decurrs and Glosse, the boy, the women, Bessie, Emily, his little girl as he’d seen her last with the blood cough dribbling down her dress. Or the slaves. No. 23, at least. Or the woman from the waves. Surely they had something to say to him. Some last accusation to make.

  But they did not come.

  The sun pressed down. The clouds hid the moon. There passed a weary time.

  Something edged into the corner of his vision. A triangle of white. A sail?

  Swift lifted his head. A wave of relief filled him. It was the haunt, come to put things right.

  But the sail was too solid. He could not see through it. It was, he realized wearily, a living ship.

  He watched it pass. There was no reason now, to summon it. No one to save.

  But the silence pressed down on him, heavy and terrible. An agony of silence.

  Swift tried to speak, but his tongue had withered with thirst. No noise came out. It was too far now, to reach the waves that washed the quarter deck. So he raised his arm to his lips. Bit down. The warm taste of blood freed his tongue. He croaked. Shouted. Wordlessly. A cry from the deep.

  The angle of the ship’s sails changed. They’d heard something.

  Swift let his head sink down again. He floated on the deck, suspended between life and death, between one possibility and the other.

  But he did not think he could die, not yet, not yet. There was a name on his cracked lips. A word like the blood in his mouth. A thing he had to tell.

  SLEEP

  CARLY HOLMES

  It was barely light when they arrived, dawn a sticky lilac smeared across the windscreen. Rosy turned to look at the small boy sleeping in a starfish sprawl across the back seat. She didn’t want to wake him; he was so perfect while he slept. But the air was cold now that the heater was switched off and they needed to get inside before he caught a chill.

  “Come on, little buddy,” she whispered, dragging him into her arms and balancing him against her chest as she heaved herself upright beside the car.

  “Mummy,” he murmured, pushing his face into her neck. “Yes, I’m here. Go back to sleep.”

  She used her foot to tip the plant pot by the front door over and sank down from the knee, straight-backed, to sweep up the key, jiggling it into the lock until it caught and turned. Behind her the first birds began their salute to the coming day. The child nipped and muttered against her throat, protesting unintelligibly as she let him slip down a little in her tired arms before gathering him close once more and carrying him into the house, using her elbow to jab at light switches.

  Stairs rose up from the entrance hall, tucked against the left-hand wall. A door to her right opened into a tiny sitting room, bare but for an armchair and an empty bookcase. No television. She’d have to do something about that soon. At the end of the hall the kitchen glowed creamy and ethereal, its cheap vinyl shine lit with the advancing morning. The cupboards under the counter were hollow squares, door-less. Their insides, once white, were gritty with ancient sprays of spaghetti and the rusted rings of long-dead cans of soup. There was a hob but no oven, and a fridge that brought saliva rushing sour into her mouth when she opened it. Even the boy, in his dream-state, gagged and moaned at the stench.

  Rosy carried him up the stairs and into the smaller of the two bedrooms, thankful that there was a bed she could lay him on. The mattress was cold to the touch, even a little damp, but it would have to do for now. If she was quick he wouldn’t wake while she fetched his blankets and pillow in from the car. Just one trip, and she’d carry as much as she could. The rest could wait until she’d slept a little.

  Back outside she stood for a while in the scrappy front garden, rocking her weight back and forth from her heels to her toes on the shifting paving slabs, and listened to the world around her. Far in the distance, back where she’d left the main road, lights strobed the horizon in quick sweeps as early risers or late-to-beds made their way into and away from their days. The beams pulsed dim as lamplight against the lightening sky, there then gone. Down here, tucked into this flat, dun-coloured stretch of nowhere, she thought they might be safe.

  Dazed with exhaustion, stumbling as she moved to the car, Rosy tried to focus on what needed to be done to get them both through the next few hours. She strung bags of toys and clothes from her shoulders, hugged a bulge of sleeping bags and pillows, and staggered back into the house. Locked inside, the top bolt shot home, she listened again before moving to the stairs and mounting them slowly. She covered the boy with blankets and slid a teddy into the crook of his arm, placed his bag of toys in the middle of the floor where he’d see them as soon as he woke, and then she left him.

  Her room had a bed frame but no mattress. She made a nest in the corner, heaping sleeping bags into a pile. Her coat she draped over the window to shut out the light, the bed frame she dragged across to the door to wedge under the handle. It wouldn’t hold against a determined assault but at least the noise of it scraping back across the floorboards should wake her. Tomorrow she’d have to get a bolt fitted.

  She prised off her shoes but kept her clothes on, crawled inside the soft tunnel of her improvised bedding, and slept immediately.

  It felt like minutes later when she jolted awake but the day was bright at the window, slicing itself into yellow wedges and searing past the edges of her hung coat. Something had woken her with a start, she was stiff with the effort to recall what. And then it came again: the rattle of the door shifting an inch or two before it met resistance. Another silence, then a steady whimpering; the low grizzle of an unhappy child gearing himself up into a full-blown tantrum.

  “Boo, I’m coming,” she called, uncurling herself from the floor and going to the window to pull down the coat and wrap it around herself. The flood of late-morning light hurt her eyes and scrubbed the last of the dreaming world from her brain. Her body ached with the need for more rest.

  Her son waited on the landing, face puffy and pink from his long sleep. He plunged into the room as she heaved the bed frame away from the door. “
Your room’s bigger than mine,” he said disapprovingly, looking around him, “but my room has curtains and a carpet and it smells better. I had a wee in the toilet but it wouldn’t flush.”

  Rosy ran her fingertips through his knotted hair, trying to carve the tangles out with her nails. The back of his neck was filthy. She steered him towards the stairs. “Good boy. So you don’t want to swap bedrooms?”

  He shrugged her hand away and shook his head. “I like my room better. Was I good last night?”

  “Take the banister. Careful as you go down, they’re steeper than the last house. Yes, you were very good. Banana sandwiches for breakfast. We’ll drive into town after you’ve had a bath and take a look round. Maybe buy you another toy.”

  While he ate his sandwiches on the back step, watched over by a line of ragged sheep from the field bordering the end of the garden, she fetched the rest of the bags in from the car. She found the switch to ignite the boiler and waited wincingly as it cleared its throat and wheezed through a few cycles, ticking and humming between each labour. The tank in the airing cupboard began to warm up. She found her travel kettle and fresh coffee and made herself a mug which she drank down quickly as she prowled the house. The sun rose a little higher in the autumn sky and glazed the gritty windows with a pearly, opaque light that made her feel as though she were walking through an old black-and-white movie. She made another mug of coffee and felt almost cheerful.

  “Boo? Tom? The water’s warm enough now. Come in and have your bath, please.”

  He grumbled his way indoors but let her strip him of his pyjamas and scrub him down while he splashed and chattered to his action figures. Rosy stroked a flannel over him again and again, lathering it with her cracked tablet of soap, washing and rinsing until the water in the tub flowed clear and his skin squeaked. His left arm was still a little crooked, she noticed, and he wasn’t using it as much as he should be. She must set time aside every day and get him to keep up with his exercises or he’d always have problems with it. Wrapped in their towel he squirmed and giggled as she dried him off.