It was getting time to head back home again.
Derrick had gathered up the towels they had brought along, and the lunch bags which Ma would want returned for recycling. The others were down the creek a ways. He could hear their laughter whistling through the paw-like leaves of the oak trees.
“Gotta go!” he yelled as he shook the sand out of the towels. He liked being big brother, the one they looked up to and depended upon. Sometimes, he felt more like their father than their brother.
“Let’s go!” he called again.
The boys came busting through the bushes. Brian collapsed in the sand. “Beat ya,” he said, lying flat on his back.
“Did not,” Georgie cried. His arms were braced on his legs as he collected a breath. His eyes kept looking to Brian, as if he knew he had been beaten and wondered if his younger brother might make too big a deal out of it.
“Where’s Tammy?” Derrick asked. “Pa’s gonna be real upset if we don’t get ourselves back by supper time.”
Brian dragged himself to his feet. “I beat ya,” he said again, pushing Georgie up the side of the short bank. When they had made it to the top, they stopped and turned back to their older brother. “Thought you were in a hurry.” Brian said.
“What about Tammy?”
Then there was a short pause that seemed to last forever, and his brothers exchanged a curious glance. Then a chill wound up Derrick’s spine as he recognized their bewilderment. He didn’t inquire a third time. The story was still fresh in his mind. Who’s Tammy? Just another spasm, that’s all. No need to ask further, just fill in the blanks. There is no Tammy. There never has been. She was just a product of the same game, the same hiccup of imagination that birthed Sarah. And now they were both gone. An imaginative quirk, that’s all it was.
“Derr, it’s getting late.”
He glanced up at the voice and wondered, almost casually, if the two boys who had been his brothers for almost every minute of his life, if they too, were mere quirks. The thought scared him.
“Derr ...”
“Yeah,” he said, flipping the towels over his shoulders. “Coming.”
Tammy never returned. He knew she wouldn’t. And like his parents and his brothers, he never asked about her.
That night, Brian went off to sleep in his own room, the room that Derrick’s imagination had lent to Sarah and Tammy. It seemed lonelier without Brian sleeping in the corner, without his arm hung over the edge of the bed, brushing a hand against the floor. At least he still felt the comfort of Georgie’s rocking, the comfort of the bunk bed swaying back and forth as it had always done as long as he could remember. At least that hadn’t been taken from him.
Summertime lost its magic after that. The days became too hot, Miner’s Pond too cold. The beautiful yellows and greens around the farm shriveled, becoming deathly browns. The laughter that had so often swept around the dinner table, became a whisper, a cough of its past joy. Everything changed, and somewhere along the line, memories of yesterdays gradually became more and more difficult to call up again, as if pieces of his life were somehow being consumed. The magic of summertime had been lost and everything was suddenly different.
Even his parents seemed somehow different, somehow changed. He wasn’t sure exactly what the difference was, and wondered if perhaps it was merely his imagination at play again.
“Remember before?” Derrick heard his mother ask his father one night. They were outside on the front porch, casually gliding back and forth on the porch swing, allowing themselves to be overheard by the evening stars and by Derrick himself. He was upstairs in the attic, poking through old boxes of toys, searching for a game of Cootie which he hadn’t seen in years. Just a bored-night impulse, that was the only reason he was there.
“Before what?” Pa said.
The arthritic squeaking of metal to rusting metal filled the moment of silence and drew Derrick curiously closer to the window.
“Before we got married,” she said. “Remember how we used to walk along Dogwood Creek at night and the breeze would rustle through the trees, sounding like God himself was trying to talk to us? And how we always knew we’d get married and live out the rest of our lives together? How it was never gonna change?”
Pa chuckled. “I remember.”
“I miss those times,” she told him.
“Guess I do, as well.”
“They were good times.”
“The best,” his Pa agreed.
“I want to go back.” The rhythmic squeaking paused for a breath, then started up again. “I want it to be like it was then, without the worries and the fears, without the kids and the farm to look after.”
Pa didn’t say so much as “Hmm.”
“Mind ya, I’m not unhappy,” she said. “But it’s all slipping by so quickly. I want to do it all again. I want to court and marry and make babies all over again, like it was the first time.”
“Been feeling this way all summer, have you?”
Derrick couldn’t see them on the porch, they were sitting almost right underneath him, but he imagined her nodding her head. He stepped back from the window, suddenly feeling a strange sense of shame from his eavesdropping, realizing his ears had crossed the path of something they were never meant to hear. But they had heard, and Ma had been different all summer. Perhaps that was the only trick of his imagination that hadn’t really been a trick. She had been different. The whole summer had been different.
He left the attic without ever finding the game of Cootie.
Brian blinked out of his life two days later. Derrick woke up to find the bottom bunk empty and when he went searching for Georgie, he found the ten-year-old in Brian’s room where Brian should have been, rocking Brian’s bed the way he used to rock the bunk beds.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked. “Where’s Brian?”
Through sleepy eyes, Georgie expressed his puzzlement, that same puzzlement that had surfaced after each of Derrick’s summer-long inquiries, after each loss that had seemingly slipped away unnoticed. And Derrick knew, he knew and he understood and he felt the emptiness devour another portion of his life. Georgie was all he had left, and what would happen after his last brother slipped away?
What would happen then?
It was early August all too soon. The fields were dry and dusty. Miner’s Pond had dipped so low that a soul couldn’t dive off the cliffs without meeting the bottom head first. His mom was looking different by the day. His father was too. Like the summer hadn’t withered them like everything else it touched. Like they thrived somehow on the heat and the dirt and the peace that had shadowed the farm. That’s what it was—peace. Too much for Derrick’s liking. The meals were too quiet, the days too empty.
He stayed close to Georgie whenever he could, whenever he wasn’t off tending to chores or running errands or sleeping in his own bed, a wall away from his little brother. But it happened just the same.
He woke up one morning and he was the last, all his brothers and all his sisters were finally gone. He was all that remained. And he imagined his parents breathing a heavy sigh, relieved that at last the inevitable moment was near, the moment when their oldest child would finally slip away like the others.
There were days now, unlike past summers, when he wished he had never been the oldest, the last to go. How much easier it would have been to have simply slipped away like Sarah, right at the beginning, never having to watch as the others were taken one by one, never having to feel each loss. How much easier.
Each day thereafter painfully dwindled away, seconds feeling like minutes, minutes like hours, until his leave-taking finally arrived. It was nine-thirty. The sky was black on a moonless night. The window was open, inviting the slight breeze inside to chase away the godawful heat. It was like a thousand other summer nights, yet unlike any that had come his way before. From the top bunk, with his arms folded behind his neck, he gazed out the window to the darkness of the universe and wondered where it ended, wondered if he
would float out there after ...
... as he sometimes did in his dreams.
“Derr?” A shaft of hall light sectioned his darkness, and his mother’s silhouette filled the doorway. “How you doing?”
“Okay.” He didn’t want to look at her, kept his watch on the universe instead. It would be easier that way. But she crept into the darkness, right up next to his bed, and she stood over him, a shaft of light falling across her face. It was the first time, as he forced himself to look at her, that he realized just how she had changed over the summer.
“Is it too hot for you?”
The singe of gray that had danced like a wind-blown scarf through her hair was no longer there.
“I’m comfortable.”
And her eyes had come alive again, they had a sparkle in them that he hadn’t noticed in years.
“You sure?” she brushed the hair away from his forehead, then held his hand in hers. “You know I love you,” she said.
Derrick glanced out the bedroom window at the watching universe. He wanted to tell her he still loved her, but knew he wouldn’t be able to find a way to say the words.
“Remember that,” she said. “Remember I love you.” Then all too quickly, she turned and started out of the room.
“Ma,” he said, still moving away. “Are you sorry I’m your son? Are you and Pa sorry you ever had me?”
She paused, a wisp of shadow in the doorway. “Of course not. You’re our son, our flesh and blood. You’re a part of us. We’ll always love you.”
“Even if I have to go away?”
Her eyes were hidden in a checkerboard pattern of black and white, but the long silence answered his question for her. And he knew then that she didn’t even understand what she had done, that it had all been done out of innocence, out of an ignorance of the consequences of her wishing. I want to court and marry and make babies all over again, like it was the first time.
“I still love you, Ma,” he told her. “Even if I have to go away.”
“There’s nowhere to go,” she said. “Nowhere at all.”
The bedroom door closed.
Darkness rushed in through the open window.
Derrick rolled over, rolled away from his doorway to the windowed universe, until he was nestled safely in the wings of his blankets, Then a single tear tumbled down his cheek, a tear not for himself, but for his mother.
DEAD MEN’S FINGERS by Phillip C. Heath
Born in Austin, Texas in 1953, Phillip C. Heath moved about the country a bit until the lure of the Lone Star State brought him back again. Currently he works as a real estate representative for a large corporation in Dallas. By his own confession, Heath has “a soft spot for the Gothic or Victorian style”—a fondness that has probably relegated his work to the pages of small-press publications where they don’t attract the notice his stories deserve. Heath is a careful craftsman, with a deft touch for conjuring forth an icy atmosphere of fear. A pity that major horror markets demand trendy, as opposed to traditional, fiction. Nonetheless, Heath has established a reputation in the small press, with appearances in Whispers, Fantasy Tales, Damnations, Gothic, The Horror Show, and elsewhere. His stories have also been anthologized in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, and Nightmares. “Dead Men’s Fingers” is from the new Canadian fantasy magazine, Borderland.
So is the great and wide sea also: wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.
There to the ships, and there is that Leviathan: whom thou hast made to take his pastime therein.
These wait all upon thee: that thou mayest give them meat in due season.
—The Book of Common Prayer
“Sail hoooo!”
All eyes were abruptly averted upward.
“Where away?” someone bellowed.
The lookout, seated precariously on his perch in the crosstrees a hundred feet above the rolling sea, pointed one hand to the horizon, cupping his mouth with the other. “A barque by the look of ’er,” he sang out, “ ’ull down about four points forward the starb’rd beam!”
The British whaleship, Jezebel, came alive. Every man on board forsook his various chores and rushed anxiously to the bulwarks to gaze out over the deep, blue expanse of water. The first mate promptly informed his superior, Captain Seabury, who emerged from his cabin to join his crew topside. Adjusting a brass spyglass to his eye, he summarily gave the order to alter course, and soon the English frigate was tacking toward the small speck on the skyline roughly three leagues distant.
Undoubtedly a single, similar pattern of thought played through the minds of the mariners who watched as they steadily closed the distance between the two vessels. It had thus far been a rather disheartening voyage: from London across the Atlantic—by now virtually depleted of the sperm—was a long and tiresome journey in itself. Southward, the once bountiful Brazil grounds offered few sightings and little encouragement. On past the chill, barren Falkland Islands, they struggled around Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. Though summer in those latitudes, the ship battled its way through tremendous head seas and skirted frightful fields of Antarctic ice, enduring howling gales for almost three weeks, as nights and days merged into gray sameness. Once having gained the Pacific to the west, they spotted, gave chase and killed two baleen whales near the island of Massafuero, several hundred miles off the coast of Chile, but one of them sank before it could be properly hitched and was lost.
So the men aboard the Jezebel understandably were impatient to reap the rewards of their hardship. A whaleman’s life was necessarily shaped by loneliness and exhilaration, tedium and terror; always voracious for nature’s bounty—if he could persevere to secure it, for he was well aware of how sorely the odds were against him, and in favor of his adversary. Admittedly, last year was a very profitable one for Pacific whaling, yet with scarcely six hundred barrels of oil in the hold no one need be reminded that scores of ships in the past, for whatever reasons, had returned home freighting barely enough cargo to pay expenses. Hence, they were keen to have a customary gam, or visit, with this passing vessel—hopefully a sister whaler—and learn what favorable prospects might lie waiting in the vast and trackless sea ahead.
As the Jezebel neared the other ship they saw that it was indeed a whaler, about one hundred feet long, of approximately 370 tons; and although was square-rigged except for the mizzenmast, all but the light sails had been reefed, as if already hove to for the night. Whalers were seldom under way in darkness except when traveling between whaling grounds or trailing a wounded whale—but it was scarcely late afternoon. Closer still, and it was observed that the ship seemed somewhat neglected; the entire hull was encrusted with barnacles, and it looked a bit ragged overall. From the way it rode in the water, listing slightly to starboard, it gave the impression of being either fully laden in bulk or else had sprung a leak. But what was most peculiar—disconcerting, in fact—was that there was absolutely no movement or sign of life on deck. Whereupon someone noticed the pennants flying at three mastheads—a signal for help.
They maneuvered alongside the other ship, identified by the lettering on its stern as the Reaper, and lines were thrown across and made fast.
At first the possibility of a plague was debated, and the consequences of close contact between ships. However, the captain theorized this was probably not the case, nevertheless restricting anybody from boarding the vessel unless expressly authorized.
He squinted to the west. “It shall be dark in an hour or so,” he mumbled to himself. Then, to the boatswain: “Back the main tops’l, and proceed to snug her for the night. Mr. Cribb?”
The first mate, a swarthy, broad-shouldered chap, appeared at his side. “Aye, sir?”
“Pick two of the deckies to accompany us,” he instructed. “We must board her and investigate ere nightfall takes us.”
The others were mustered, and the informal party clambered on board the
Reaper. The ship was cloaked in an eerie hush. Only a vagrant, light breeze periodically set the shrouds to moaning softly.
Captain Seabury turned to the others. “One of you men have a thorough look-see topside, another search the fo’c’s’le; Mr. Cribb, you explore the contents of the hold, and I shall locate the captain’s quarters.” They nodded and separated accordingly.
Belowdecks, it was even more oppressively deserted than above. The narrow companionway led directly to the captain’s cabin, and Captain Seabury descended into a deepening gloom. Once in the cabin he called out to the crowded shadows. “Ahoy! Anyone about?”
There was no answer, save the dull, choppy gurgle of the sea as it washed along the outer hull of the ship. In the semi-darkness he tripped over a chair on his way to the captain’s desk, but there found a scrimshaw lantern and lit the candle nub within. Aided by the dim light he eased next into the captain’s head, empty, and the captain’s stateroom—which was not. On the berth reposed the form of a body, covered completely by a blanket that appeared to be riddled with holes and blotched with dark stains, which he quickly recognized as dried blood. A discharged pistol lay on the floor beside the bed. Something thin and white protruded from the edge of the blanket.
Captain Seabury reached down and jerked off the blanket.
His stomach clenched. It was a human skeleton, still clothed in only a tatter of rags, and one of the hands held a Bible to its chest. A conspicuous hole in the side of the skull indicated a suicide.
Unwilling to tarry, Captain Seabury pushed on to the first and second mates’ cabins which were both unoccupied. But in the former he discovered the ship’s logbook. This, he knew, should divulge at least some hint as to what had occurred aboard this mystery ship. The book was opened to the final entry, dated just two days ago. He was going to scan it there and then but a sudden noise close by caught his attention, and he wheeled around, listening.
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