The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “You stay put, Haro,” said my father. “Here’s a light. You shine that. You remember when and what to do? As I told you?”

  “Yes, Da.” I said, afraid with a new affright I should do it wrong and fail him. But he patted my shoulder as if I were full-grown, and went away down the cliff path with the others. Soon enough I heard them, those 300 feet below me, voices thin with distance and the unravelling of the wind, there under the curve of the crumbled white-green cheese of the cliff-face. Though I was quite near the edge, I knew not to go too far along to see, but there was a place there, a sort of notch in the crag, whereby I could see the glimmer of the lamps as they uncovered them. And I knew to do the same then, and I uncovered my lantern too.

  So we brought it in. The thing with the clouded trees that was adrift on the earthquake of great waters. The thing that was a ship.

  She smashed to pieces on the rocks below, where the tallest stones were, just under the surface at high tide, against rock and shale, and the faces of angels and devils, and against their broken wings.

  This was our Night Work then. In tempest or fog we shone our lights to mislead, and so to guide them home, the ships, and wreck them on the fangs of our cliffs. And when they broke and sank, we took what they had had that washed in to shore. Not human cargo, naturally. That counted for nothing. It must be left, and pushed back, and in worse case pushed under. But the stores, the barrels and casks, the ironware and food and, if uncommon lucky, the gold, those were rescued. While they, the human flotsam, might fare as wind and darkness, and their gods – and we – willed for them, which was never well.

  I saw a woman that night, just as the great torn creature of the vessel heaved in and struck her breast, with a scream like mortal death, to flinders on our coast. The woman wore a big fur cloak, and also clutched a child, and in the last minute, in intervals of the storm-roil, I saw her ashen face and agate eyes, and he the same, her son, younger than I, and neither moved nor called, as if they were statues. And then the ship split and the water drank them down. But there was a little dog, too. It swam. It fought the waves, and they let it go by. And when it came to land – by then I craned at the cliff’s notch, over the dangerous edge – my father, Jom Abinthorpe, he scooped up the little dog. And my reward for that first night of my Night Work was this little innocent pup, not yet full-grown as neither I was. Because, you will see, a dog can tell no tales, and so may be let live.

  But the ship and her crew, and all her people, they went down to the cellars of the sea.

  I was always out to the Work with the men after that. By the time I was eleven, I would be down along the shore, wading even in the high savage surf among the rocks, with breakers crashing sometimes high over my head, as I helped haul in the casks, and even the broken bits of spars that we might use, when dried and chopped, for our fires.

  Hampp is a lorn and lonely place; even now that is so. And when I was a boy, let alone in my father’s boyhood, remote as some legendry isle in the waste of the sea. But unlike the isles of Legend, not beautiful, but bony bare. There were but a dozen trees that grew within a ten-mile walk of the village, and these bent and crippled by the winter winds. In summer too there were gales and storms, and drought also. What fields were kept behind their low stone walls gave a poor return for great labour. And there was not much bounty given by the ocean, for the fish were often shy. The sea, they said, would as soon eat your boat as give you up a single herring. No, the only true bounty the sea would offer came on those nights of fog or tempest, when it drew a ship toward our coast and seemed to tell us: Take it then, if you can. For to do the Work, of course, was not without its perils. And to guide them in too required some skill, hiding the light, then letting out the light, and that just at the proper angle and spot. But finally the sea was our accomplice, was it not, for once drawn into that channel where the teeth of the rocks waited in the tide, and the green skull faces of the outer cliffs trod on into the water and turned their unforgiving cheeks to receive another blow, the ocean itself forced and flung each vessel through. It was the water and the rocks smashed them. We did not do it. We had not such power, nor any power ever. And sometimes one of our own was harmed, or perished. Two men died in those years of my boyhood, swept off by the surge. And one young boy also, younger than I was by then, he broken in a second when half a ship’s mast came down on him with all its weight of riven sail.

  But ten ships gave up their goods in those years between my ninth and fourteenth birthdays, and I was myself by then a man. And the dog had grown too, my rescued puppy. I called him Iron, for his strength. He had blossomed from a little, black soft glove of a thing to a tall and long-legged setter, dark as a shadow. He was well-liked in our house, being quiet and mannerly. Also I trained him to catch rabbits, which he killed cleanly and brought me for my mother’s cooking. But he hated the sea. Would not go even along the cliff path, let alone to the edge with the notch, or down where the beaches ran when the tide was out. Whenever he saw me set off that way to fish, he would shift once, and stare at me with his great dark eyes that were less full of fear than of disbelief. Next he would turn his back. And here was the thing too; on those nights when the weather was bad, and the watch we posted by roster spied a ship lost and struggling, Iron would vanish entirely, as if he had gone into the very air to hide himself.

  I thought after all he did not know what we were at. Certainly, he would eat a bowl of the offal of any beef or bacon or whatever that came to my family’s portion out of a wreck. By then, I suppose, it had no savour of the sea.

  He had not known either that we let his ship, his own first master likely on that ship, be drowned. Iron only knew, I thought, that my father, and next I, had plucked him from the water after all else was gone.

  For a while I had recalled the cloaked woman and her son. I said nothing of it, and put it from me. And soon I had seen other sights like that, and many since that time. The worst was when they tried to save each other, or worse yet, comfort each other. Those poor souls. Yet, like my dog, I would stare then turn my eyes away. I could not help them. Nor would I have, if I could. We lived by what we took from them, lived by their dying. All men want and will to live. Even a dog does, swimming for the shore.

  Iron is here now. He leans on my leg and the leg of the chair. Strange, for there is iron metal there also, but he does not know this. They are kind, compassionate to have let him in. Well then. Let me tell the rest.

  I had seen fogs often, and of all sorts. Sea-frets come up like a grey curtain but they melt away at Hampp and are soon gone. The other sort of fog comes in a bank, so thick you think you might carve it off in chunks with your rope-knife. And it will stay days at a time, and the nights with them.

  In such a fog sometimes a ship goes by, too far out and never seen, yet such is the weird property of the fog that you will hear the ship, hear it creak and the waves slopping on the hull of it, and the stifled breathing of the sails if they are not taken in and furled. It was often worthwhile to go down with extra lanterns then, and range many lamps too along the cliff by the notch, for the ship’s people would be looking for landfall and might see the lights, even in the depths of the cloud. But generally they did not. They passed away like ghosts. After they were gone men cursed and shrugged, wasting the lamp-oil as they had and nothing caught. But now and then a ship comes in too far, mislead already by the fog and by the deep water that lies in so near around our fanged rocks. For surely some demon made the coast in this place to send seafarers ill, and Hampp its only luck. These ships we would see, or rather the shine of their own lanterns, and they were heard more clearly, and soon they noticed our lamps too, and sometimes we called to them, through the carrying silence, called lovingly in anxious welcome, as if wanting them safe. And so they turned and came to us and ran against the stones.

  That night of the last fog I was seventeen years, and Iron my dog about eight, with a flute of grey on his muzzle.

  I had been courting a girl of the village, I will n
ot name her. But really I only wanted to lie with her and sometimes she let me, therefore I knew we would needs be wed. So I was preoccupied, sitting by the fire, and then came the knock on the door. “Stir up, Jom Abinthorpe. Haro – waked already? That’s good. There is a grey drisk on the sea like blindness, come on in the hour. And one’s out there in it, seen her lamps. Well lit she is, some occasion she must have for it. But sailing near, the watch say.”

  So out we went, and all the village street was full of the men, shouldering their hooks and pikes and hammers, and the lanterns in their muffle giving off only a pale slatey blue. By now I did not even look for my dog Iron, though a few of the men had their dogs with them, the low-slung local breed of Hampp, with snub noses and big shoulders, that might help too pulling the flotsam to shore.

  We went along the cliff, near the edge now all of us, but for the youngest boys, three of them, that we posted up by the notch. Then the rest of us went down to the beach.

  It was a curious thing. The fog that night was positioned like a fret, one that stayed only on the sea, and just the faintest tendrils and wisps of it drifted along the beach, like thin ribbons of smoke from off a fire.

  The water was well in, creaming clear on the shale, the tide high enough, and not the tips of the fangs below showing, even if the vessel could have made them out. But the ship was anyway held out there, inside the box of the fog, under the fog’s lid, like a fly in thick grey amber.

  It was a large one, too, and as our neighbour had said, very well lit. In fact crazily much-lit, as if for some festival being held on the decks. We all spoke of it, talking low in case our words might carry, as eerily they did through these fogs. The watchman came and said he reckoned at first the ship had caught fire, to be so lighted up. For she did seem to burn, a ripe, rich, flickering gold. How many lamps? A hundred? More? Or torches maybe, flaming on the rails—

  A dog began barking then behind us, a loud strong bell of a bark. Some of the men swore, but my father said, “It’s good. Let them know out there land is here. Let them hear and come on. Let’s show the lanterns, boys. I’ll bet this slut is loaded down with cash and kickshaws – we’ll live by it a year and more.”

  And just then the vessel slewed, and the line of it, all shown in light, altered shape. We knew it had entered the channel and was ready to run to us.

  Something came rushing from the other way though, and slammed hard against my legs, so I staggered and almost fell. And turning, I saw my dog there. He was standing four-square on the shale, panting and staring full at me with eyes like green coals. Brighter than our uncovered lamps they seemed.

  I said Iron would never come to the sea, nor anywhere near it.

  “Wonders don’t cease,” said my father. “The dog wants to help us with it too. Good lad. Stay close now—”

  But Iron turned his eyes of green fire on my father, and barked and belled, iron notes indeed that split the skin off the darkness. And then he howled as if in agony.

  “Quiet! Quiet, you devil, for the sake of Christ! Do he want to sour our luck?” And next my father shouted at me. I had never seen him afraid, but then I did. And I did not know why. Yet my whole body had fathomed it out, and my heart.

  And I grabbed Iron and tried to push him back. “Not now, boy. Go back if you don’t care for it. Go home and wait. Ask Ma for a bit of crackling. She knows when you ask. She’ll give it you. Go on home, Iron.”

  And Iron fell silent, but now he sank his teeth in my trouser and began to tug and pull at me. He was a muscular dog, though no longer young, and tall, as I said.

  The other men were surly and restless. They did not like this uncanny scene, the flaming ship that drove now full toward us and cast its flame-light on the shore, so the cliffs were shining up like gilt, and the opened lanterns paled to nothing – and the dog, possessed by some horrible fiend, gnawing and pulling, his spit pouring on the wet ground in a silver rain, as if he had the madness.

  And then there came the strangest interval. I cannot properly describe how it was. It was as if time stuck fast for a moment, and the moment grew another way, swelling on and on. Even Iron, not letting go of me, stopped his tugging and slavering. And in the hell of his eyes I saw the wild reflection of the gold fire of the ship growing and moving as nothing else, for that moment, might.

  “By the Lord,” said my father softly, “it’s a big one, this crate.” It was such a foolish, stupid thing to say. And the last words I ever did hear from my father.

  They call them she; that is, the seafarers call each ship she. As if she were a woman. But we did not. We could not, maybe, seeing as how we killed them in the Night Work. Just as we ignored the women who died with the ships, and the children who died.

  But now I must call it she. The ship, the golden ship.

  Believe this or not, as you will.

  I do not believe it, and I saw it happen. I never will believe it, not till my last breath is wrung from me. And then, I think, I shall have to.

  The moment which had stuck came free and fled. We felt time move, felt it one and all. It was as if the two hands of a clock had stuck, and then unstuck, and the ticking of it and the moving of it began again.

  But as time moved, and we with it, it was the ship instead that froze. Out there at the edge of the grey slab of the fog, under it, yet visible now as if only through the flimsiest veil. She was well in on the last stretch. She could not stay her course. No vessel, mighty or slight, could have stayed itself now. So far she had driven in, she must hurl on towards her finish against the rocks, and on the faces of the cliffs around, those that crowded out into the sea to meet her. Yet – she did not move. Our clock ran, hers had halted. But oh, something about her there was that moved.

  I behold her still in my mind’s eye. So tall, six or seven decks she seemed, and so many masts, and all full-laden with her sheets. There was not a man on her that I could see. None. Nor any lamps or torches to light her up so bright that now, almost free of the fog, half she blinded me. No, she blazed from something else, as if she had been coated, every inch of her, in foil of gold, her timbers, her ropes, her sails – coated in gold and then lit up from within by some vast and different fire that never could burn upon this world, but maybe under it – or high above. Like the sun. A sun on fire at her core, and flaming outward. Lampless. She was the lantern. How she burned.

  Not a sound. No voice, no motion. Even the ocean, quiet as if it too had congealed – but it moved, and the waves came in and lapped our boots, and they made, the waves, no sound at all.

  And then the dog, my Iron, he began to worry at me, hard, hard, and I felt his teeth go through the trouser and he fastened them in my very leg. I shouted out in pain and turned, not knowing what I did, as if to cuff him or thrust him away. And by that the spell on me was rent.

  I found I was running. I ran and sobbed and called out to God, and Iron ran by me and then just ahead of me. It seemed to me he had me fast by an invisible cord. I had no choice but to fly after him. And yet, oddly, a part of me did not want to. I wanted only to go back and stand at the sea’s brink and look at the ship – but Iron dragged me and I could not release myself from the phantom chain.

  I was up on the cliff path when I heard them screaming behind me and some 150 feet below. This checked me. I fell and my ankle turned and a bone snapped, but I never heard the noise it made, for there was no sound in that place but for the shrieking of the men, and one of them my father.

  Of course, I could no longer stir either forward or back. I lay and twisted, feeling no pain in my foot or leg, and stared behind me.

  And this is what I saw. Every man upon that shore, every lad, even the youngest of them, ten years old, and the dogs, those too, and those screaming too as if caught in a trap, all these living creatures – they were racing forward, not as I had inland, but out toward the sea, toward the fog, toward the golden glare of the ship – but they howled in terror as they did so, men and beasts, nor did they run on the earth. They ran on water.
They ran through the air. The three children from the cliff-top – they too – off into the air they had been slung, wailing and weeping, and whirling outward like the rest. And up and up they all pelted, as if racing up a cliff, but no land was there under their feet. Only the ship was there ahead of them, and she waited. The thin veil of the outer fog hid nothing. The light of her was too fierce for anything to be hidden. The men and the boys and the dogs ran straight up and forward, unable to stay their course until, one by one, they smashed and splintered on the cliff-face of the golden ship, on the golden fangs and cheek and rock of the ship. I saw so clear their bones break on her, and the scarlet gunshot of their blood that burst and scattered away, not staining her. As they did not either, but fell down like empty sacks into the jet black water. Till all was done.

  After which, she turned aside, gently drifting, herself as if weightless and empty, and having moved all round she returned into the fog, under fog, and under night and under silence. She slid away into the darkness. Her glow went soft and melted out. The fog closed over. The night closed fast its door, and only then I heard the waves that sucked the shale, and the pain rose in my leg like molten fire.

  They will be hanging me tomorrow. That is fair; it is what I came to the mainland for, and made my confession. At first I never said why I had had to. How I had crawled up the path, with my dog helping me. And in the village of Hampp, all the faces, and seeing that each one knew yet would not speak of it. My mother, she like the others. How I stayed two months there, alone, until I could walk with a stick, and by then almost everyone had left the place, the empty houses like damp caves. And then I left there also. But I came here, and my dog quite willing to cross water, and I found a judge, and was judged.