Word went round that Matthew’s remains would be buried at sea at sunset. All hands would attend, but as they smartened themselves up in the forecastle the mood was still hostile. Gathering them all together in front of the captain would precipitate the crisis. They knew it, and they looked forward to it.
“You tell him,” said Singleton to Podmore. “Tell him that blasted jewellery has to go overboard, whatever the rules, or it’ll be the end of all of us.”
“I ain’t saying anything to the old Man,” said Podmore.
“We’ve all got to go to him in a body and tell him,” said Charley. “Or this whole ship is finished.”
“And I say the old Man knows his business,” said Podmore.
Nilsen, the engineer and senior in the fire room, would have been the next ranking man, but he was away dealing with some matter on the engines. But the firemen were not likely to side with the sailors.
“It’d be better coming from you,” said O’Neill, appealing to Podmore. “You lead us, he can’t ignore all the hands together.”
“If he doesn’t listen, we can seize the thing by force,” said Singleton. “Fling it over the side. It’s not theft, because it’s not his, or any living man’s. We can get the key to his stateroom from Yang.”
“We’ll have no mutinous conduct on this ship,” said Podmore quietly. “Nor on any while I’m aboard.”
Singleton squinted at him. The old sail maker was calm and determined.
He knew something right enough, but he wouldn’t say what.
“What strange days these are,” remarked Nilsen, coming into the forecastle. He seemed cheerful, smug even.
“And what’s making you so chipper now?” demanded O’Neill.
“Our old Man, he has tricks up his sleeve,” said the engineer. He paused by O’Neill and tapped his temple. “He thinks of things.”
“Like what?” asked O’Neill.
“You’d never guess it,” said Nilsen, pulling off his soot-stained shirt as he reached his bunk. “He found a way between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
The others waited, patient and silent, as he put on a clean shirt and buttoned it up.
“Butcher called me to the captain’s stateroom,” said Nilsen. “It was quite strange. The old Man had that golden jewellery, and he was making pictures of it. He had the chart lenses, and he was looking at each of the scales in turn and making a picture with a pencil in a logbook. Butcher and I come in and we stand there, and we keep standing there as the old Man finishes one picture and starts another, a thing like a big twisting snake. And we wait while he draws it on the paper, and turns the page and starts looking at next little scale. So Butcher coughs and says ‘I have Nilsen, sir.’”
“What was he drawing it for?” asked Podmore.
“He did it like he was mesmerised,” said Nilsen. “‘It’s time,’ says Butcher. The old Man was like a little boy when the nurse wants to take his toy away. ‘I keep thinking I’ve got all the faces taken down, but then I find another one.’ And Butcher says nothing, and the old Man he sighs, and he looks up and he sees me. ‘The Royal Society would like a sight of this, Nilsen,’ he says. ‘Did you ever see workmanship like this?’ and he holds it up to me with the glass. ‘I believe if I had a microscope I’d still not see everything in it.’”
I tell him I have seen Swiss watches which have this detail.
“‘Can you hear it?’ he asks me. ‘Butcher says he can’t hear it, but I can.’ And I can hear it too, just a faint sound, a sound like a gnat whining. I almost can’t hear it.”
“Singing gold?” said Podmore.
“Just very faint,” Nilsen said. “Some vibration of the particular metal alloy, I suppose. I am not a specialist in this. The old Man shuts his book and stands up, and Butcher nods, and the three of us go down to the engine room together. They tell me what to do, and I put the golden jewellery on a shovel. And I open the boiler door, and very carefully I hold the shovel over the fire. This is tricky work, let me tell you.”
“So you destroyed that damned thing?” asked Singleton hopefully.
“Let me finish telling you! After a minute the shovel is glowing red hot, and I’m starting to burn myself because you shouldn’t stand there with the boiler door open, and the gold is glowing a little but it hasn’t changed. And this is very strange, because, you know, the melting point of gold is low, about one thousand degrees centigrade, it should melt before this.
“So I stoke up the fire a bit and open the vent, and put a cloth over my head, and I keep trying. I’m watching the necklace very carefully because I don’t want to drop it, and the old Man and Butcher are watching me. I keep thinking gold should melt sooner, but it just stays there.
“‘Can’t you make it any hotter, Nilsen?’ asks the old Man. Well! I take a hammer and I smash a bucket of fresh coal into powder, and I toss that in. Fresh-powdered coal gives a good heat. And I tell Bell to open the vents full and work the bellows by hand.
“I have wet towels round my face and my shoulders, and I’m burning when the necklace starts making sounds. It’s pinging and popping and tinkling like hundreds and hundreds of little bells. And it just melts all together, all the little scales at the same time, and it’s a puddle of liquid on the end of the shovel. And I tell you, the shovel itself is ruined from the heat.
“In fact, we ran hotter than it’s supposed to go. It just took me an hour to put the furnace back to right, bend a plate or two and correct the seals to the boiler….” Nilsen would have gone on about his precious engines, but nobody was interested.
“What about the melted gold?” demanded Podmore.
“I take it out of the boiler and Butcher had put this holystone on the deck.”
“A holystone?” asked Podmore.
“It was hollowed out,” said Nilsen. “He put it down for me to pour the gold into. He had been working it with a chisel and he had cut into the surface like a mould. So I poured the gold, very, very carefully so every drop went in. The stone cracked a little bit but it stayed together. I splashed some water over myself—I thought I’d be blistered all over, but it wasn’t so bad—and when I turned around they were taking it out of the mould. They’d turned it into the shape of a cross.”
There was a murmur around the forecastle as the sailors began to see what their old Man had been thinking.
“And the captain has his Bible and he reads out the blessing over it,” said Nilsen.
“The captain’s good as a priest on board,” said Singleton, nodding. “He takes the Sunday service and everything. He’s got the Church’s authority at sea, just the same as he’s got the Queen’s.”
O’Neill, a good Catholic, murmured dissent. A Protestant captain had no rank in his church that he had ever heard of. But the others were all approval.
“And when he’s finished,” says Nilsen, “he turns to me and holds it up in the light, and he says. ‘Fine work, Mr. Nilsen, very fine work. This is a proper Christian cross, wouldn’t you say?’ And I say ‘Yes, sir, it is. Even though the ends were not right, they were long, and all bent around, almost like a wheel. Not like a normal cross. But he said to leave it like that.”
“He’s a practical man,” said Charley. “He knows how to take the curse off.”
“So that’s what he’s about,” said Podmore. “I stitched Matthew into canvas today, saw there was something round his neck.” The task of sewing bodies into sailcloth fell to the sail maker; tradition said that the last stitch went through the corpse’s nose to confirm he was dead. “Butcher put a gold cross round his neck before I put the last stitch in. I wondered where it come from.”
“What does the bent cross mean?” asked Hall. Nobody answered him, but later he remembered seeing Miller cross his arms over his chest. It was an old, ritual gesture of warding, a gesture more ancient than the Pharaohs or the Patriarchs. The gesture echoed the shape of the bent cross.
Ten minutes later, all hands were mustered on deck. The sky was empty but for dis
tant wisps of clouds, and the sun was just clear of the horizon. The steam made a fine, clean trail behind the ship. A trestle had been placed by the rail, and two planks laid together, one end on the rail and the other on the trestle. On top of the planks was a bundle wrapped in sailcloth. It contained the mortal remains of Matthew, lately of the island of Ambrym in the New Hebrides. It also contained some old anchor shackle and pieces of broken yard pin to weigh him down. In among this scrap were two pyramid-shaped lead weights.
A Union Jack with a white border was placed over the parcel. There had been some argument in the forecastle, but, as Podmore doggedly insisted, Matthew served as a sailor on Ly-ee-Moon and the old Man did right to give him a sailor’s burial. Even if a man drowned on the first day of his first voyage, he was a sailor for that.
Charley tolled the bell with a steady, slow rhythm. At every swing to starboard the semicircle of steely water seemed to come up with a rush, as if impatient to take the body. Shadows came and went just below the surface, floating like logs just below the surface but somehow keeping pace with the ship.
At a word from Butcher the tolling ceased, and all caps came off.
The captain of the SS Amaryllis stood by the trestle, his peaked cap in his hand, looking on the parcel as though in judgement. He was tall, smart as a guardsman with his double row of brass buttons, his gold braid and polished boots, his beard neatly trimmed. He waited a few moments, perhaps for the wind to be just so before he began.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” the captain proclaimed in a powerful foredeck voice. The old Man could make himself heard in a storm, he could out-shout the thunder. “Therefore can I lack nothing, He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth besides the waters of comfort.”
The men listened attentively, heads lowered in a seemly show of reverence. The captain read through to the end of the psalm. He continued in a more commanding tone.
“For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep, in sure and certain hopes of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Butcher gave the signal, and as Podmore and Nilsen raised the ends of the planks Butcher snatched up the Union Jack. The planks were well greased, and the parcel slid easily, disappearing over the side in an instant, taking with it the savage and his new-fashioned gold cross—which might be a Christian cross, or something subtly different. No personal property but religious symbols were deemed appropriate to be interred with their remains, according to the captain’s handbook and company rules.
Every man on the deck exhaled. The ship seemed to lift in the water, as though a heavy freight had been transferred ashore, or ballast dropped.
Hall was standing closest to the rail. He leaned forward and caught the faint circle of vanishing ripples as the waters closed over the parcel. The forms that swarmed around the point of impact might have been sharks, or something else. They dispersed again swiftly as though fleeing danger.
The captain ordered a hymn, even though it was not part of the regular burial service. We sang “Dark was the Deep, the waters lay” like a crew of ragged angels, raising our voices lustily to the heavens, sure at last of our salvation, praising the Lord as one.
The sun sank quickly below the horizon as the hymn ended, and a peace descended. The sky above and the sea below were empty of menace. The crew turned in, and if their mattresses were not quite dry it did not stop one of them from having a deep and untroubled sleep.
The story of the two strange shipwreck survivors, who had escaped the Ly-ee-moon only to be claimed by death days later, was duly worked up and embellished and circulated round the ports where the Amaryllis stopped on her journey back to Bristol. By then it was not a story of fish-men at all, but a tale of the workings of fate and unlucky gold.
Hall never told anyone what he had seen that night in the corridor, the shadows thrashing in the water as he fled for his life. It did not come back to him all at once, but in fragments, as though the pieces were held in separate compartments. He knew finally that he had only escaped because the maniac Crocker had attacked those fish-things, assaulted them with all the strength of a lunatic, pounding them with fists like hammers—and they had turned on him and devoured him like a shoal of hungry barracuda. Jaws and teeth that fastened on to him, the ankle-deep water sluicing away the fast-flowing streams of blood and shredded flesh. Hall knew also that Matthew must have been watching too, through the hole in his door. They had not just killed Crocker, they had torn him apart and devoured every bit. Matthew could not get away from the sound of that frenzy, and the terror of it had stopped his heart.
THE NORWOOD BUILDER
Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and
melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my
own, that he was the prey of success. I had indeed warned
him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his tale of
what he felt himself about to discover.
—H. P Lovecraft, “From Beyond”
A lath-and-plaster partition had been run across the passage six feet from the end, with a door cunningly concealed in it. It was lit within by slits under the eaves. A few articles of furniture and a supply of food and water were within, together with a number of books and papers.
“There’s the advantage of being a builder,” said Holmes, as we came out. “He was able to fix up his own little hiding-place.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle. “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”
I
The last thing Lottie remembered was trying to tear her hand free from the handcuffs. They were too tight; each jerk bruised and lacerated her wrist, but it was the only way she could get free. At the same time, another part of her was thinking it was all her own fault, that she should never have come, that she should have realised how dangerous Jack was.
It had all started so well. It was a day out in the country for her, far from South London. The Peugeot lurched and splashed its way along the puddled track, and the Satnav pinged as the little cottage came into sight. She pulled off the track which led to the farm proper, parking up in the broad gravel parking bay. There was a barbed-wire fence, with sheep cropping the grass on the other side.
A pale full moon stood over the hill in the morning sky. It was a picturesque addition; you never see a moon like that in the city.
The converted farm building was clean and spare, stripped down to its original stone, with a new tile roof and clean PVC window units. It was a holiday let, an old barn or cattle shed renovated and put to profitable use.
“Call Grant,” Lottie told her phone, and he picked up on the first ring. “Are you there?” Grant asked. “How strong is the phone signal? How does the place look?”
“It looks normal,” she said. “Signal`s fine. Stop worrying, hon.”
“I’ll call you in twenty minutes,” said Grant. “Take care.”
She put the phone away as Jack came out of the house. He must have heard the car. He had not changed much: skinny jeans, faded Echaskech T-shirt, unruly hair, a cluster of silver earrings through one ear. He ambled over with his familiar cheeky grin, looking her up and down.
“You came!” he said. “Great, really great. You look fantastic. Short hair really suits you.”
Lottie hesitated a moment as he leaned in and kissed her, but it seemed perfectly natural. They were exes, after all, and for all Grant’s worrying she did not mistrust Jack. And from this close she could see he was glowing. If he was female, Lottie would have diagnosed pregnancy or a new lover. Or just perhaps he had livened himself up with some chemicals before she arrived.
“How long have you lived here?” she asked.
“Ah, a few months.” He looked around the sweep of farmland, the hedgerows, the grazing sheep, the black plastic sheeting held taut over a silage heap with car tyres, as though he had not seen them before. “It’s okay. I wanted somewhe
re quiet.”
The front door opened directly into a main room that took up most of the ground floor: one end was a living room, the other one was a dining room with a galley kitchen. Wooden stairs spiralled up to a mezzanine bedroom above. The high ceiling and windows on three sides gave it a bright, open look, and the décor was untouched show house. A set of prints of heaped apples and rustic vegetables was distributed over the walls, along with an imitation copper warming pan and sprays of dried flowers.
There were piles of papers and books and magazines on every surface, as though someone had just unpacked boxes of them while moving in. They were Jack’s, and Lottie knew they would never get tidied away any further. They occupied every flat surface, like drifting snow. He was still just as untidy as ever. In the living room area there was a desk with a laptop, and the papers seemed to cluster more thickly around it.
“Your girlfriend isn’t a tidiness freak then,” she said. He had mentioned he was with an Australian girl called Lisa. She had not made much impact on the place, but there was a pink anorak hanging by the door with some flowered Wellingtons.
“No,” he said. “She’s working today. In the pub.”
“Is that where you met her?”
Jack laughed at that and scratched his chin. He was still as predictable and easy to read as ever.
“Take a seat and I’ll fire up the kettle.”
The solid dining table, bare wood like the rest of the furniture, had been swept clear of clutter. There was just a teapot, some mugs, and a Murakami novel which Jack must have been reading while he waited for her. Lottie took the sole empty chair.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 29
