by Paula Guran
“What the fuck?” It was Jack. He was standing in the engine hatch; clearly he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “You stupid bloody—what the fuck, man?” He clambered up through the hatch and started towards us. Claire tried to get in his way, but he pushed her angrily to one side; she went sprawling into the wheelhouse. Jack squared up to me, fists clenched: no matter how smoothly it had gone with Andy, I saw I was in for at least one fight that evening. He swung away, cursing, and dropped to his knees; I realized he was scrabbling around down in the gutters for the boat-hook he’d used earlier, so that he could fish Andy out of the water a second time.
I was backing round on to the foredeck, trying to think what to do, how to explain it to him, when several things happened more or less simultaneously.
The spotlight on top of the wheelhouse glowed dully for a moment, then blinked sharply back into life; it caught Jack in the act of rising from his knees, boathook in one hand, the other shielding his squinting eyes as the beam shone full into his face. Danny’s voice rose above the engine sound: “Got you, you bastard! Batteries up and running!” And in the wheelhouse, Claire was shouting: “Will? Will!”
Heedless of Jack, who by then was down on his knees plunging the boathook into the black water, I pushed past and into the wheelhouse. “What? What is it?”
Fist up to her mouth, Claire just stood there, unable to speak. Then she pointed at the console. The fish-finder was beeping still, more frequently than before, more insistently. I looked at the traces on screen and my mouth went dry.
Down underneath the Katie Mae, fathoms down in the dark and cold, big sluggish blips were rising; detaching themselves from the sea-bed, drifting up towards the surface. I didn’t need Jack to interpret them for me this time; I recognized them all too well. Before, we’d thought they were seals. Now, we knew better.
“ . . . Stay here,” I managed to get out. Claire nodded, and I turned back to the doorway of the wheelhouse. There was Jack, bending over the side of the boat, his back to us. The stretch of water beyond him was brightly illuminated by our spotlight, still pointing where Claire had left it earlier. One look was all I needed. I grabbed Jack by the shoulder: he’d managed to hook a shapeless mass in the water, and was struggling to bring it in to the side of the boat. “Jack, Jack,” I croaked in his ear; “wait, no, look out there . . . ”
He pushed me away with a curse, went on trying to raise up the body in the water. I thumped his back, hard, and he swung round, ready to hit me. “Fucking look,” I hissed, and almost despite himself he turned round.
There they were, caught by the spotlight on the still surface; bodies, rising up out of the sea. Five or six just in that bright ellipse of light; how many others, out there in the dark where we couldn’t see? I’d counted at least a dozen on the fish-finder; there might be more by now. A low, unspeakably nasty sound came back to us over the waves, somewhere between a hiss and a gurgle. At the same time a stink hit us from off the water, like nothing I’d smelled before nor want to ever again. Jack turned back to me, round-eyed, horrified; opened his mouth to say something. Then it happened.
A hand came up and grasped the boathook. It nearly pulled Jack in; quickly he steadied himself, clutching at me and letting go his grip on the wooden shaft. The thing that had grabbed it—the thing Jack had thought was Andy—disappeared under the waves again, taking the boathook down with it, then bobbed back up to the surface. Whatever it was, it had been down there far longer than Andy had. Most of what had once made it human was rotted away; what was left was vile beyond my capacity to describe. It rested there on the swell awhile, goggling up at us as we stood petrified on the deck. Then, without warning, it swung the boathook up out of the water.
The metal hook ripped a long hole in Jack’s T-shirt. Within seconds, the whole of his chest was slick with blood. He staggered back, and the hook caught on the belt of his jeans. It nearly dragged him into the water, but I grabbed him just in time. He was screaming, wordlessly, incoherently. So was I; but I held on tight, arms round his body, feet braced against the scuppers, straining backwards with all my might.
I managed to call out Danny’s name. I felt him grab on to me from behind and yelled as loudly as I could, “Pull!” We both strained away, and then all of a sudden the pressure was off and we all three of us went sprawling backwards, me on top of Danny, Jack across both of us. We disentangled ourselves, and Jack pulled clear the boathook from his belt. Before he flung the whole thing as far away as he could, we had just enough time to see the hand and lower part of an arm that still clung to the other end.
Meanwhile Danny had seen what was happening out on the water, the bodies coming to the surface all around. From the look on his face I knew he was going to lose it unless I did something drastic, so without thinking I spun him round and practically threw him into the wheelhouse. “Get us out of here,” I told him, and turned back to where Jack was kneeling on the deck. There was blood all over him, and over me too where I’d held on to him: I knelt down alongside him to see how badly he was hurt, but he pushed me away. I knew it was because of what Claire and I had done to Andy, but there was no time for that now. I looked round for something I could use to defend the boat with, yelling over my shoulder, “Danny! Move it!”
A throaty grumble came from aft as the diesels turned over, choked momentarily, then caught. “Get us out,” I shouted, as there came a clang from the foredeck. I clambered up around the wheelhouse, spinning the spotlight around to face for’ard as I went. There was the boathook that Jack had thrown away, snagged this time on the prow. Something was using it to clamber up and over the rail: without thinking I ran towards it and kicked out hard. My foot sank part-way into a soft crunching mass; the momentum almost sent me spinning over, but I managed to steady myself on the Samson post as the thing splashed backwards into the water. There was something on my foot, some reeking slimy filth or other—I was scraping it frenziedly against one of the cleats, trying to get the worst of it off, when I became aware of Danny hammering the glass windscreen of the wheelhouse.
He was yelling something about “haul it in”: I didn’t understand what he was saying at first, but then I realized. We were still riding at anchor; Danny had revved the engines to loosen the anchor from its lodgement on the sea-bed, but before we could open up the throttle and head for clear water it needed to be winched all the way back in.
I edged back round the side of the wheelhouse, with no time to stop for Claire as she pressed her face to the glass, her lips forming words I couldn’t hear. Below me, down in the water, things were moving up against the side of the boat. We had to get clear.
The capstan was on the starboard side, by the door to the wheelhouse. I gave a tug at the anchor-rope: it wouldn’t shift. “Again,” I called up to Danny in the wheelhouse; he engaged reverse thrust again, and the rope creaked, then gave a little as the anchor cleared the sea-bed. I threw the switch that turned on the electric motor of the capstan, but just at that moment there came a vicious tug on the rope. Sparks flashed beneath the motor housing, and an acrid gout of smoke rose from the capstan-head; I tried it again, and again, but the motor had burned out. Frantically, I tried to use the hand-bars to winch up the anchor, but the whole thing seemed to be fused solid. “Jack,” I shouted; he looked up from where he lay cradling his stomach, saw the problem, and struggled over to help.
Five fathoms, maybe six; that’s thirty-six feet of rope first, then chain, and a heavy iron anchor at the end of it. It took Jack and I all the strength we could muster to raise it, arm over arm, winding the slack around the useless capstan-head. It wasn’t the first time we’d had to haul up an anchor manually, but it seemed far heavier now than it ever had before, impossibly heavy, and when we’d got it almost all the way up, as far as the ten foot or so of chain before the anchor itself, I looked over the side to see if we were still snagged on anything.
Have patience with me now, because I have to tell this a certain way. In the village where I used t
o live as a child, near Diss in Norfolk, there was a pool out in the fields which was absolutely stiff with rudd, a freshwater fish related to the roach. We used to tie a piece of string around a fivepenny loaf and throw it in, and then we’d watch the water boil as we pulled on the string to bring the bread back up, the whole thing completely covered in a huge squirming feeding-cluster of rudd. That scene, that image, was what I thought of as I peered over the side of the Katie Mae and saw the anchor just below the surface.
Clustered round the anchor, hanging on to it in a crawling hideous mass, were maybe six or seven of the bodies; dragged up from the oozing deep, these, up from long years of slow decay down where the sun’s warmth and light never penetrates, there on the chilly bottom. Green phosphorescent eyes stared back at me, and a billow of putrescence erupted in bubbles on to the surface. I dropped the anchor chain as if it had been electrified, and the gruesome mass sank back a foot or two into the water.
“Hang on!” Jack grabbed at the chain quickly before the lot went down again. “Keep it tight!” Out of his pocket he pulled a hunting-knife; I didn’t get what he meant to do with it until he began to saw at the anchor-rope above the chain where it was wound round the capstan. Understanding at last, I pulled on the chain to keep the line taut. All the while, I was hearing things: sounds of splashing and gulping from over the side where the anchor was banging against the hull, and that awful gurgling hiss rising off the water again. Out of nowhere, words came into my head: the voices of all the drowned . . .
I didn’t dare look down there; only when Jack sawed through the last strands of the rope and the freed chain rattled over the side did I risk one quick glance over, just in time to see the anchor with its cluster of bodies receding into the deep. Hands clutched vainly up towards the surface, and those greenish eyes blinked out into cold fathoms of blackness.
Sick to my stomach with fear and disgust, I turned away to where Jack was clambering to his feet. I tried to help him up, but he brushed my hand away and went foraging instead through the storage box where we’d formerly kept the anchor and its chain. He came up with an old length of chain about four feet long; he took a couple of turns around his fist, and swung the rest around. “You take the for’ard,” he said, wincing as he held his wounded stomach; “I’ll get the aft. Get something from in here—” he kicked the storage box—“and use the spotlight if you can, so’s we can see what we’re up against. Danny!” He roared the last word in the direction of the wheelhouse. “What’s with the fucking hold-up? They’re all around us, man: Will and me can’t keep ’em off forever, you know!”
The boat was hardly moving in the water. From aft came the sound of spluttering, overstressed engines; Jack swore and looked at me narrowly. “You just keep your eyes peeled back here,” was all he said; he tossed me the length of chain and stumbled off into the wheelhouse to get the Katie Mae moving again. Around us in the water, the shapes multiplied: there must have been twenty of them now, more maybe. Drawn by God knows what—the promise of dry land, perhaps, or some primal impulse more atavistic, more terrible than that—they were converging on the boat. And all I had was a four-foot length of chain to keep them off.
Maybe not all: suddenly there was the beam of the spotlight shining on to the aft deck, picking out the white painted railings, the glimmer of the sea beyond and below. I heard Claire’s voice: “Over that way, Will;” the beam swung round, then steadied on a ghastly greenish arm slung over the port side.
I swung the chain at it. It cut a rent along the length of the arm, laid bare the glint of white bone, but the fingers didn’t relinquish their grip. A head and shoulders hoisted up above the side of the boat. I gave it another swing of the chain, and this time the contact was good. It toppled upside-down, its head in the water, its feet caught up in the tyre buffers slung around the hull, and with a few more slashes I managed to dislodge it entirely. But by then Claire was screaming, “Behind you, behind you,” and when I turned round another of the creatures was already halfway over the aft rail. Again I let fly, but not strongly or viciously enough. The chain only wrapped around its arm: it caught hold of the links, and began tugging me in towards it. Repulsed, I let go immediately; the thing teetered there a moment, then the engines kicked in at last. It was caught off balance and fell backwards: a horrible splintering noise and a shiver that went clean through the boat told me it had hit the propeller.
We began to pick up speed, pulling away from the writhing mass of bodies on the surface, but there were still a dozen or more of the things hanging on to the side of the boat, arms twined in the tyre buffers, hands clutching on to the railings, hammering at the clanging echoing hull. If we slowed down, they would try again to get up on board. We had to shift them somehow. I was leaning over the side, whacking away with a wrench from down the engine hatch, when Jack appeared at my side. The blood had dried black all down him, and he looked like he should have been in a hospital bed; instead, he was sloshing diesel oil from a big jerrycan over the side of the boat and on to the clinging bodies. “What you doing?” was all I could get out between panting.
“Kill or cure,” he said grimly, edging all along the side of the boat emptying out the diesel on to the creatures that hung leechlike to the hull. In a minute he was back round to my other side. He dumped the jerrycan straight down onto the head of one of the things, sending it sinking beneath the waves, then reached in his pocket and brought out his cherished old brass Zippo with the engraved marijuana leaf. With just a trace of his usual flamboyance, he flicked open the top and ran the wheel quickly along the seam of his bloodied jeans, down, then up, like a gunslinger’s quick-draw. The flint struck and the flame sparked bright, first time every time; Jack held it aloft for a second, then dropped it over the side.
I snapped my head back just in time, feeling my eyebrows singe and shrivel in the sudden blast of heat. Immediately, flames sprang up all along the waterline, lighting up the ocean all around us a vivid orange. For a little while we could see every detail of the things in the water; how they writhed and bubbled in the flame, how their mouths opened and closed, how they charred and blackened as the fire licked up the hull, blistering the paintwork, setting light to the tyre-buffers. I heard a hissing indrawn breath from Jack beside me, thought for a moment oh no, he’s fucked up, he’s got it wrong with the diesel, the ship’s going up, and then I saw where he was looking down in the water. One of the burning bodies was Andy’s: arm upraised, face still recognizable amidst the flames, it slowly rolled off the side and was lost in our wake, along with the rest of the corpses of the drowned.
It was already brightening in the east as we brought the Katie Mae back into harbor. All her sides were scorched and black and battered, and we—her crew—were similarly scarred, though in ways less obvious and maybe less repairable with a sanding-off and a fresh lick of paint. Jack had refused our help with his stomach wound on the way back; he’d sat out on the aft deck hugged into a fetal tuck, not talking to anyone, not looking anywhere except backwards at our lengthening wake. Claire and I sat squeezed up on the wheelhouse bench behind Danny, who stood at the wheel staring for’ard all the way home to Beuno’s Cove. We didn’t try talking to each other; really, what was there to say?
When we came alongside, Jack scrambled up on to the quayside to tie us up. He stood looking back at the boat for a second, silhouetted above us in the predawn light, then without saying anything he turned away. I glanced back at Danny and saw he was crying. Perhaps I should have done something, I don’t know what, but Claire took my hand and more or less dragged me up on to the quay. We left him there on the deck; I wanted to say, are you going to be okay, but perhaps Claire was right. It was the last time I ever set foot on the Katie Mae.
Back home Claire ran straight upstairs and turned the shower on. I went up after about twenty minutes and she was squatting in a corner of the stall with the hot water running cold, arms wound about her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. What could I do? I got in there and fetched her out, g
ot her dry, got her warm; but I couldn’t stop her shivering, not until she finally fell asleep on the bed, hours later, after we’d tried and failed to talk through the events of the night just gone. We tried several times again, in the days and weeks that followed, but it never came to anything; we felt the way murderers must feel, and so, I suppose, did Jack, because not long after he moved away, and no one ever saw him again, not Claire or me, not even Danny.
Back to that first morning, though, the morning after. I stayed with Claire for a while till I was sure she was properly asleep, then I eased off the bed and went downstairs. There was a book I’d borrowed from Danny’s old man, a collection of maritime myths and legends of North Wales: I went through it and found the entry for Llys Helig. A curse had been laid on Helig’s family and their lands, vengeance for old wrongs, a whispering voice coming out of nowhere heard all around the great halls and gardens of Llys Helig prophesying doom on his grandsons and great-grandsons, and one day the floodwaters came and washed over everything. And ever since, said the legend, the drowned have never rested easy in that stretch. As if. I preferred Danny’s dad’s unvarnished version myself: that the sea was just twitchy out there, no more, no less. Nothing you could explain away with spells and whispers and fairy tales, a condition no story would cover; just a state of things, something you knew about and left well alone, if you knew what was good for you.
But there was something else; something that had been at the back of my mind ever since I’d first heard those hisses and gurgles out on the waves. I didn’t have nearly as many books then as I have now, but it still took me the best part of half an hour to lay my hands on it: Dylan Thomas’ Selected Poems. And I read there the poem, the one I’d half-remembered:
