The Dunfield Terror

by William Meikle

  “Alan must have noticed that I wasn’t looking up at the light show. He came down to my level.

  “‘You got something under there, Pat?’

  “I nodded.

  “‘Eddie says it’s a dog. I’m not so sure. I thought I heard something click—like a big crab maybe? But if it is, it’s the biggest fucker there’s ever been.’

  “I thought that might get me a laugh, but Alan went quiet, real fast. He turned to Eddie Todd.

  “‘Fetch me the rake, boy,’ he said. ‘It should be against the back door—and be quick about it.’

  “While Eddie did as he was told, Alan and I sat on our haunches trying to peer under the porch. He had me spooked now, so I wasn’t about to look any closer than I needed to. All I had to do was look at Alan’s face to see that he thought we were in some kind of trouble and I was old enough by then to know better than to go hunting for it.

  “‘What is it?’ I asked, but I didn’t get a reply. The others were all still staring at the light show. Nobody spoke—that’s the main thing I remember. Normally you couldn’t get a man of this bunch to keep quiet long enough to get a word in edgeways—but that night they were dumbstruck—a word I’d never thought to be true, but here it was, in the garden of my local bar.

  “While I was musing over that, young Eddie returned with the rake—and a long billhook, one of those ones we use to bring in the codfish. He handed the rake to Alan, but kept the hook, holding it in front of his body as if expecting to have to defend himself from attack.

  “Alan poked the rake under the porch. Something immediately scurried away, with several accompanying loud clacks. I knew then it weren’t any kind of coyote; and it turned out to be far stranger than that.

  “Alan moved the rake around a bit more, and seemed to get it snagged on something. The scurrying under the porch got more frantic.

  “‘Got you, fucker,’ Alan said, and started to pull.

  “Now you boys know, I been all over the world, and I seen some strange sights in my time—but nothing stranger than what Alan pulled out from under the porch that night. At first sight I thought it was a bloody huge squid—it had long tentacles, and an oily, slimy body. But it was the size of a small dog—and no squid ever had eyes like that—four of them there were, on little stalks that swiveled as it looked straight at me and down into the pit of my soul. I was feart of the thing even before I saw that huge claw—something that belonged on the biggest fucking lobster you’ll ever see, and didn’t look right at all on the rest of the body.

  “’What the hell is that?’ I asked, but Alan was in no mood for questions. He dragged the full body of the thing out from where it was still trying to scurry away and hide.

  “Now that it was fully out in the open, I could see that its skin—if that was the right word for it—wasn’t really oily. It was made up of the same stuff as the light show above our heads—blue and green and gold, all shifting and pulsing in time with its labored breathing.

  “Nobody was looking at the lights now—all eyes were on the thing at Alan’s feet.

  “‘Give me a hand here, lads,’ Alan said, but nobody moved at first, all of us unable to quite believe what we were looking at. The thing raised its claw and clacked at us angrily. Alan tugged at the rake—he had it embedded where the ribs might be in an ordinary beast. There was no blood, no inner fluid, just puffs of rainbow dust that rose in the air each time Alan pulled.

  “The innkeeper turned to young Eddie.

  “‘Get the spare kerosene, Eddie. Quickly, boy.’

  “I took the billhook from the lad, at the same instant as the thing made a lunge, straight at Alan, that huge claw raised for attack. What I did next was pure instinct. I brought the hook up and down, hard, right into the thing’s back. It fell in on itself with a soft crumpling motion, as if it was made of little more than skin and ash.

  “Alan stomped down on it, hard, his heavy boot leaving an imprint behind on the ground among a body that had fallen into just a heap of dust and ash. Colored dust wafted in the air for a second, then fell to the ground. The light show flickered, blazed blue, just once, then was gone, leaving us with only the image of the light behind our eyes and sifting, crumbling dust on the ground at our feet. Alan’s footprint sat in the middle of it—as clear as any left by Armstrong on the moon.

  “Some of the others bent for a close look at the ash and dust, prodding and poking at it with their fingers. I’m glad now I weren’t one of them, for two at least—George’s dad for one—were dead within the year—cancer, they said, but do you know what I think? I think when they opened the dead men up, they might have found little more than a lot of that dancing rainbow dust.

  “Alan tossed the rake aside as Eddie returned with the kerosene. We all stood back as he poured the whole can—a gallon or more—over the remains of the dead thing and set it alight. We got another light show for a few minutes—orange and yellow and blazing, although we didn’t enjoy that one quite so much.

  “Then we went back inside and started to get as much booze inside us as we could manage.”

  17

  Present day

  It was only when Pat got out a smoke and lit it that I realized his story was done.

  “My pa never told me any of that,” George said softly.

  “Weren’t no reason for any of us to tell anybody,” Pat replied. “Alan didn’t want it broadcast around town—it wouldn’t have done what little custom he got much good, would it? Besides, he was worried the thing might come back again. ‘I’ve already burned the bloody thing twice,’ he said. ‘How many times will I have to do it before it stays down?’”

  I was wondering how to connect what I’d seen at the inn’s garden with Pat’s story, but so far I was coming up blank. All I knew was that I’d seen something—time slip, vision or mirage? Damned if I knew, or whether it made any difference, whichever it might have been. Pat seemed to have been thinking along similar lines.

  “Seems like the inn is some kind of focal point for whatever is going on here, doesn’t it?” Pat asked, looking at me.

  I nodded.

  “The inn, and over the wreck in Dunfield Bay. The fucker has its favorite places, just like regular folks do. It doesn’t help us any to know though—it’s not as if it hasn’t been turning up in other places. And a billhook wouldn’t have helped me any out at the campsite.”

  Nor would it have helped old Mrs. Malloy.

  I sat staring at the stove—I was done, physically and mentally, completely wiped out and now running on fumes and instinct. My brain felt full of something soft and fuzzy, and I struggled to keep my eyes open for all of a minute before I gave in and fell into the blackness of dreamless sleep.

  18

  1856

  From the journal of an unnamed seaman, discovered in Trinity town archives

  “The Irishman’s in trouble.”

  It was no night to be out on the water, but it was an unwritten law in Trinity. If one of us is in trouble, we all are. I drank down the shot of rum I had but left the ale where it sat. The sea was going to be rough enough as it was without having sour beer rolling in my guts as well. I was in a crowd of about a score that headed out to the dock to peer through the wind and spray.

  “How far out?” someone asked.

  “Out passed Indian Head Rock toward Dunfield Bay. Floundering bad and holed on the port side,” came the answer. “We’ll need four boats at least.”

  The long rowboats normally took eight men each, but we had to leave room for bringing the Irishman and his crew back with us if need be. We set out, five boats with four of us in each, rowing hard into a headwind and swell that threatened to send us as far back as forward with every stroke.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been out in such conditions, but it was a first attempt to rescue a big whaler such as The Dubliner. I knew they’d been out for three weeks, and guessed they might even have a catch aboard. Their weight, the weather and the sheer number of crew we were going
to have to shift were large in my mind as I heaved on my oar, trying to ignore the increasing pain and tiredness that I knew was only the start of the evening’s trials.

  By the time we reached the narrows—the outlet from the relative calm of the harbor into the rougher seas of the larger bay beyond—we were all near spent, and matters weren’t helped much when the first boat out got caught in heavy swell and tipped over. They were too far away for us to help, but I saw clear enough that all four men made it to higher ground ashore, although their boat was smashed into so much kindling against the rocks below them.

  The men clambered up to the point and waved that they were safe. I knew they were soaked to the skin, and had a long, wet walk ahead of them to get back to the warmth of a tavern. But I couldn’t waste time worrying on their part, as we too had to fight the rising swell and a crosswind that threatened to send us to the same fate as we headed along the exposed shore.

  I was so busy concentrating on keeping us upright and moving forward that I was nearly thrown from my seat as the prow hit something, hard. I turned to yell an oath at Roberts at the bow…and looked up to see the massive bulk of The Dubliner loom over us.

  * * *

  I helped Roberts and Gallagher tie us up, and we got the other three boats alongside so that we were all arranged in a line along the whaler’s keel on the starboard side, protected from the wind. It was around then I started to worry. I would have expected someone topside to have at least acknowledged our presence. Instead all we could hear was the whistling wind and the crash of waves.

  “Ahoy aboard,” Roberts called out. He had a bellow like a foghorn and if there were anyone aboard, they’d surely hear him. But we got no answer. I saw the same fear in Gallagher’s eyes that I felt. Nothing good had happened here. And I wasn’t at all sure that any good was going to come of us investigating further.

  But as I said already; if one is in trouble, we all are. When Roberts started to clamber out the rowboat to head up onto The Dubliner, I was second in line behind him, with Gallagher at my heels.

  As I climbed, I steeled myself for the sights to come; I’d seen plenty of dead men smashed to no more than broken puppets by storms, and I expected that more of the same awaited us on deck.

  I climbed over the gunwales and stood beside Roberts. The deck lay empty save for the large whale carcass on the platform at the stern. My fears of finding corpses were allayed, for the moment, but I had a sinking feeling in my gut as I realized we were going to have to search the vessel.

  The deck lurched beneath us as the boat was caught in a larger swell, and for a second I thought we were going to be tumbled back over the side, but the keel righted itself; this time.

  As the boat steadied, more men came up out of the rowboats. Roberts waited until there were more than a dozen of us on deck, then organized the search. I went with Gallagher and Roberts himself. We headed for the crew quarters, while others went to search the engine room, the mess and the cargo holds. Four men were put to work trying to get the vessel moving again, the plan being to get her at least through the narrows to quieter waters in the sheltered bay inside.

  The first thing that struck me as we went below was the quiet. The big steam engine wasn’t running and there was no one at the wheel as we passed. And as we went down, the silence seemed to fall on us like a blanket. Several oil lamps hung overhead at irregular intervals, and they provided a modicum of light, but as they swung in the swell, they cast bands of dark shadows along our way, shadows that seemed to cavort and caper, leading us deeper into what I feared would be our own doom.

  I’m not afraid to admit that my legs felt like jelly, and every fiber of me just wanted to flee, back to the tavern and the welcoming arms of as much rum as I could get inside of me. But for the presence of Roberts and Gallagher, I might even have allowed myself to succumb to the terror. But my fear of ridicule was stronger still, and I followed Roberts as we went deeper into the boat.

  The captain, Irish Frank, wasn’t in his cabin. It was empty save for a bottle of rum on the sideboard that shouted at me even as we turned away to the corridor. When we looked in to the next cabin, I wished I had listened.

  We had found our first corpse.

  At first I was not entirely sure what I was seeing. It looked like someone had left a pile of clothing on the floor. Then I saw the blood, a slimy trail of it that led in a six-inch-wide strip away from the clothing, across the floor…and then up the wall to where it stopped at the open porthole. As I bent for a closer look, it became all too obvious that what was left of a man was still inside the clothing. It was little more than a sack of dry skin and bones, papery, almost like ash, as if all the wet parts had been somehow sucked out of him. I heard Gallagher gag and spew, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight. I had no idea what could do this to a man; I only knew that I did not want to meet the culprit anytime soon.

  “I know that jacket,” Roberts said softly. “It’s Edward Malone.”

  I forced myself to take another look. Roberts was right. It was Ed, or rather what was left of him. A fierce drinker, a born seaman…and a man who would fight you as quick as look at you. Anything that could reduce so ferocious a sailor to a pile of rags and leave no sign of a struggle was most definitely nothing I wanted to meet. I started to back away when Gallagher shouted from out in the corridor.

  “There’s another one here.”

  Now that we knew what to look for, we found more remains at every turn. And in each case we found no indication as to the cause of the deaths, only more bloody trails, most of which led from the bodies to outside of the vessel by the most direct route available.

  “What in blazes happened here?” Gallagher whispered.

  Neither Roberts nor I had an answer for him, but we wouldn’t have had time in any case. The silence was broken by a scream from above; a yell of pain and suffering that tore at my heart to hear it.

  We headed topside at a run.

  * * *

  We arrived on deck to a scene of bloody chaos. Men ran and screamed, blood flew, the wind howled and the vessel bucked and rolled beneath us. And all around, beasts slithered, too fast for the eye to follow, only being still where they had affixed themselves to some poor sailor. On first sight, I took them for octopus or squid, for they had bunches of sucker-laden tentacles that they used to cling to their prey. These tentacles were attached to a head the size of a man’s clenched fist. But no octopus ever had pincers, and these most clearly did—sleek, black and as deadly as any blade as they clacked and cut and butchered any that they caught.

  And no squid ever had a face like these. The eyes were the worst, four of them each, bobbing on stalks that swiveled this way and that as they searched for more prey. The stalks sat above a mouth of sorts, an elongated tube of muscular tissue that pierced the victim’s butchered bodies and started to feed. The moist sucking noises reached us even above the howling of the wind, and I do believe that sound was the most terrible aspect of the whole scene.

  The beasts seemed to be everywhere, swarming across the deck in fast, fluid motion. Six men had already fallen, and three more feebly tried to keep the ravenous beasts away from them with little success. Gallagher reacted first; he jumped at the nearest beast and tried to drag it off its victim. All he succeeded in doing was tear a fist-sized lump of flesh away from the poor man’s chest. The creature writhed and squirmed in Gallagher’s hands, tentacles quickly circling his wrists and starting to squeeze. Its pincer clacked open and shut, looking for something to cut.

  “Get the bastard thing off me,” Gallagher shouted.

  Roberts obliged him, but was more circumspect in his approach. He stepped quickly down below deck and came back with an oil lamp.

  “Turn your head, man,” he said to Gallagher, then, without waiting for an answer, spilled hot oil on the beast’s face. The eyes popped, flesh sloughed away and it fell to the deck. Gallagher stomped on it until it was little more than jelly and dust, just to make sure.

 
Another man—I’m fairly certain it was McGuinness the stoker—ran past us with one of the things clamped on his face. He went over the side without a sound and fell away. I ran to the rail to look over.

  The sea below seethed, filled with the squirming, writhing tentacles of the beasts. I saw that three men had made a bolt for a rowboat, but they were caught and even now were little more than cold meat; food for scores more of the creatures that massed around the corpses, tentacles waving as if excited by the kill.

  Almost as if the beasts knew I was watching, half a dozen heads turned, beady eyes staring up at me. A high wail, like a gull in the wind, came from six mouth parts, then as one they moved, scrambling up the hull, coming straight for me.

  If The Dubliner had not lurched in a swell at that precise moment, I believe I would have been taken, for I was so transfixed at the sight of the creatures that I could not move from the spot. But when the deck tilted, Roberts too saw what was coming, and dragged me aside.

  “To the stern, man,” he shouted. “And pray the lifeboat is there.”

  We ran, even as the things clambered up over the gunwales and came after us.

  Someone fell behind me, but I didn’t even stop to look. Gallagher, Roberts and I were the only men still standing by the time we reached the stern. The sight that met us there made me fear that I was not going to outlive my old mates by very long.

  A sperm whale lay on the platform—the whaler’s last catch. And it was now obvious that the dead whale was also somehow the source of the infection. Its belly was vastly swollen and distended. I would have blamed a build-up of gases after its death, if I could not see the gaping hole in the blubber, and the writhing, seething nest of tentacled beasts all fighting to escape from within. It seemed the whale was little more than a carcass; a carcass filled to a bursting point.