Tales of Terror from the Black Ship

by Chris Priestley

  If Pitch was not dead, then at least the cat seemed to hold Tom in such dread that he could not bring himself to come up on deck for fear of their meeting, and Tom took pleasure in that.

  Tom was working the mainsails one day when he looked down and saw the captain once more studying the rail where the hatchet had relieved Harper of his tattooed hand. Something about the way the captain peered forward and picked at the scar in the wood with the end of his finger made Tom uneasy. Without thinking, he ceased what he was doing and began at once to clamber down the rigging.

  But no sooner had he reached the bottom than the captain called to Tom, waving him over, and Tom wished he had stayed aloft and cursed himself for a fool. He was still muttering to himself as he crossed the deck, but the captain’s voice was friendly enough to put a check on Tom’s anger and make him come to his senses. There was nothing to link him with the crime other than the fact that he was on watch that night. I must keep a grip, he thought. I must stay calm.

  A sailor nearby looked at Tom strangely as he passed, and he was filled with a sudden panic that he had said these words out loud. He put his hand to his mouth. The captain called him again and Tom hurried over to meet him.

  ‘I need to speak with you a moment, Webster,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, sir?’ Tom answered. The captain sighed.

  ‘’Tis my belief,’ he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, ‘that Harper did not fall that night – leastwise not of his own foolheadedness – but that he was shoved over.’

  ‘No!’ Tom said with all the surprise he could muster.

  ‘Aye,’ said the captain, looking about conspiratorially. ‘There are signs of evil-doing of some kind. A hatchet has gone missing.’

  ‘A hatchet?’ said Tom, shaking his head.

  ‘Are you sure you saw nothing that night, Webster?’

  ‘Quite sure, sir,’ said Tom. Though he had tried to sound casual, his voice sounded thin and reedy, as if it came from a long way off.

  ‘You’re not protecting someone?’ the captain said, staring at him in a manner that made him back away and look about nervously.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Tom.

  ‘This is a bad business, lad. To think there is someone on the ship who has killed. If a man was to know about such a killing and not speak up, he would be as guilty as though he had struck the blow. Are you sure you do not wish to tell me something, lad?’

  Tom’s heart felt as though it was beating so hard and fast the whole crew must hear it. His neckerchief felt as tight as a noose against his windpipe.

  ‘Aye,’ said Tom, breaking into tears. ‘Aye, sir! I do know something.’

  ‘Then sing out, lad,’ said the captain.

  ‘It was Duncan!’ hissed Tom. ‘I saw him that night, standing at the gunwales and cleaning something from the handrail. He said he’d kill me if I spoke.’

  ‘Did he now?’ said Captain Fairlight, between clenched teeth.

  The blameless Duncan was standing nearby as Tom said these words and instantly pulled a knife from his belt, striding towards him with murderous intent.

  ‘I never spoke a word to you but I’ll sure as hell gut you now, you lying swine!’ he growled, before he was grabbed and disarmed. Tom had to turn away to hide his smile. The fool was damning himself.

  Duncan strenuously protested his innocence, but he had threatened to kill Harper on many occasions and everyone aboard knew he was capable of such an act. Tom smiled again.

  ‘This is no laughing matter,’ said the captain, seeing Tom’s face.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Tom nervously. ‘I am just relieved to see him safely held. I was sore afraid of him.’ The captain nodded. ‘Is he to be hanged?’

  Captain Fairlight said that he would lock Duncan up until they got back to Portsmouth, where a judge would decide his fate. He had never yet hanged a man aboard a ship he’d captained and it was a record of which he was proud.

  Tom tried not to let his disappointment show. He would much rather have had the man condemned there and then. The more Duncan yelled his innocence, the more men there might be who would believe him.

  ‘I hope you do not doubt my word, sir,’ said Tom. ‘For I would not inform on a man for less than murder, and he’ll kill me for sure now if he’s released.’

  ‘The law shall decide who is telling the truth, lad,’ said Captain Fairlight.

  ‘The law?’ said Tom. ‘It sounds to me as though I am not believed. I must . . .’ Tom’s eyes were momentarily distracted by a movement beyond the captain’s shoulder.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ said the captain. ‘It is not a question of believing you or not believing you. A man’s life is at stake here and justice must be done.’

  ‘Justice?’ said Tom more loudly than he had intended, and then, seeing the whole crew look round to face him, ‘What about justice for Harper?’

  His voice crackled with indignation and anger. He looked at their stupid cow-like faces and pitied them for their dull wits. But what was that moving behind them?

  ‘But if he could,’ Tom shouted, still distracted, craning his neck to try and make out what it was, ‘if he could . . .’

  Of course! Tom saw that it was the damnable Pitch, trotting out from hiding at last, no doubt secure in the knowledge that Tom could do nothing while there were so many witnesses.

  And then Tom noticed the cat had something in his mouth, and was heading gravely towards Tom as he used to do with Harper when he would ceremoniously present him with a gift of a half-eaten rat or some such.

  The cat came ever closer and Tom backed away, tripping over a rope as he did so, mumbling to himself. No one else had noticed the cat, but seeing Tom’s wild behaviour, the first mate looked back to find the cause of it – and saw what Tom had seen.

  ‘Captain!’ he said. ‘Look!’ He pointed to the cat, just as that creature opened his mouth and dropped Harper’s hand, death’s-head tattoo and all, on to the bleached deck.

  Tom stared in horror and disbelief. He had kicked the hand overboard. How could it be here? Then he remembered seeing Pitch clambering over the side of the ship. The hand must have got lodged somehow behind the rigging on the ship’s hull. The cat – that damnable cat – must have retrieved it!

  ‘Saints preserve us!’ said the captain.

  The hand had dropped into an attitude as if it was pointing, its index finger jabbing right at Tom.

  ‘’T’ain’t true!’ he yelled. ‘That cat is a devil, I tell you. I should have killed him as well when I had the chance.’

  ‘As well?’ repeated the captain.

  Tom looked about him in the eerie stillness that followed – the creak of hemp ropes and the sound of the sea as the Lion cut through the waves the only music.

  ‘As well, you say?’ said the captain.

  Tom stared, his mouth moving but no words emerging, and the crew stared back at him, grim-faced to a man, like the crowd at the foot of a gallows. Then he shrieked with rage and threw himself at the cat.

  Three crewmen wrestled him to the ground and he fell heavily to the deck, his face squashed up against the weathered boards, his eyes almost touching the blue-white flesh of Billy Harper’s hand and the grinning death’s-head tattoo.

  *

  Cathy looked at me with wide eyes and I reached out a hand to comfort her. Her skin felt cold to the touch and she pulled away, clearly embarrassed that I should be mollycoddling her in front of this stranger. We were not unused to such tales, as I have said, but this youth had a way of telling the story that made it seem real somehow.

  ‘There now,’ said Thackeray, looking at us both in turn with his head bent to one side. ‘I wonder if I haven’t frightened you both. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m not used to telling tales for children.’

  There was something about the tone he u
sed when saying the word ‘children’ that I took offence to. It was true that I was young, but age has more to do with experience than the number of years you may have walked the earth. I was hardly a child. Since our mother died and our father had taken to drink, I had almost run the inn myself and been both father and mother to Cathy. I had listened to the stories of drunks and eased them to the door at the end of the evening. I had been forced to use my cudgel on more than one occasion.

  ‘I cannot speak for Cathy,’ I said boldly, ‘but though I enjoyed your tale and you told it well enough, my sleep will not be troubled.’

  ‘Nor mine,’ added Cathy.

  Thackeray nodded and grinned, taking another sip of his rum and sighing.

  ‘That’s good drinking rum,’ he said. He leaned back and seemed lost in his own thoughts for a moment.

  ‘You seem a little young to be drinking spirits,’ I said pointedly.

  ‘You seem a little young to be telling me,’ he answered with a smile his eyes did not accompany. ‘I would have thought you’d be used to the sight of a drinking man.’

  ‘I was brought up in an inn, it’s true,’ I said, ‘but it’s left me with a low opinion of drunkards.’

  ‘And your father?’ said Thackeray. ‘Does he have this same low opinion?’

  ‘You must ask him yourself when he returns,’ I said.

  ‘I would do so gladly,’ he replied.

  I had the distinct impression that he was insinuating something, but I let it pass. After all, how could he be? He did not know my father. He did not know us. I strongly suspected he had never even been in this vicinity before and that everything he had told us to the contrary was, like his stories, pure fantasy.

  Cathy had inherited my mother’s need to be a peacemaker and leaned between us with a smile.

  ‘I see that you have a tattoo yourself,’ she said, pointing to the tattoo of an eye Thackeray had on the back of his own hand, an eye with rays of light streaming from it. He looked at it, nodding.

  ‘An old gypsy woman did that for me when I was ten or eleven,’ he said, smiling at the reminiscence. ‘Said it would protect me from harm.’

  Thackeray slapped the table, making both Cathy and me jump, and laughed uproariously. I feared he was already intoxicated and my expression clearly gave this thought away.

  ‘I’m not drunk yet, Ethan,’ he said. ‘I was laughing at something amusing, that’s all.’

  I noticed, however, that he no longer looked in the least part amused, and instead stared away into the middle distance as if entranced. Then, suddenly, he snapped out of it and turned to us, smiling.

  ‘But this is nothing compared to some tattoos,’ he said. ‘This is a child’s doodling. I’ve seen men with pictures that would grace the finest galleries etched into their flesh, with colours as bold as any fresco or altarpiece.’

  His smile became a little lopsided and he stroked his chin with his long fingers. ‘As a matter of fact, that puts me in mind of another tale I heard once.’

  ‘Tell us,’ said Cathy. ‘Please.’

  Thackeray looked at me as if asking my permission.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, not altogether succeeding in feigning a lack of interest on my part. ‘If Cathy would like to hear it.’

  Thackeray’s smile broadened into a wolfish grin.

  ‘Very well, then . . .’

  g

  Irezumi

  Stephen Fletcher was not quite twelve years old when he stepped ashore in the port of Nagasaki on the island Kyushu in Japan with his shipmate Mattie, gazing in spellbound wonderment at a myriad exotic sights. He marvelled at the people: their strange hair and clothes, and the long swords some carried that Mattie told him could slice a man in two so clean he did not feel the blow until he fell in pieces.

  Mattie Husk had taken Stephen under his wing and looked after him aboard ship. He had taught him who to charm and who to avoid, and had no doubt saved the younger lad a beating or two in this way. He was everything Stephen wished himself to be, all swagger and confidence and easy charm.

  Stephen was an only child and Mattie was like the elder brother he had never had and always craved. For his part, Mattie came from a large family and missed his little brothers. It was a trade that suited them both and they had quickly become inseparable.

  Though he was only seventeen, Mattie was already widely travelled and full of exciting stories – some of them even true – of his many voyages in the Pacific. A farmer’s son from Kentucky, he had never even seen the sea until he was ten, when he ran away to seek his fortune. Not that a stranger would ever have known that. He had the air of someone born to the sailing life and always seemed even more at home than Stephen, whose father and brothers had all been mariners.

  In fact, thought Stephen as they walked away from the quayside, Mattie was one of those people who seemed at ease in any situation – even in a place as exotic as Japan. He had been to these islands before and clearly enjoyed the idea of being Stephen’s guide.

  They were walking along a busy side street, when Mattie suddenly announced that what they ought to do most speedily was to get themselves a tattoo.

  ‘A tattoo?’ said Stephen warily, for he had been bred to equate tattoos with rogues and ne’er-do-wells.

  ‘Aye,’ said Mattie, slapping Stephen on the shoulder. ‘Every mariner must have himself a tattoo, Stephen, and they do none better than in these parts.’

  Stephen was not at all convinced that every sailor did have to have a tattoo and was sure that he had seen many aboard their ship without one, but it was part of the machinery of their relationship that Stephen tried to go along wherever Mattie led him, and so he merely nodded, though with little enthusiasm.

  ‘I seen a man once,’ Mattie said, his eyes bright with excitement, ‘a mariner who hailed from these parts and had gone to sea on account of how he’d killed a man. Best part of his whole body was painted over save for his face. It took five years to finish it, so he said. Even them parts most precious to a man was covered.’

  And here Mattie winced at the thought of such a thing, then laughed and said it must hurt like hellfire and laughed again. But all that did was fill Stephen with dread about the whole notion of having a tattoo as he did not take pain well. But he did not want to show his fear to this lad whose good opinion meant so much to him.

  Stephen’s sense of unease was not helped by the fact that they had now set off into the backstreets of that place, deeper and deeper into a darkening maze of shops and alleyways. Mattie had a piece of paper that he would occasionally take out and consult, but it was clear that he was lost. Stephen was about to point this out, when they noticed an old man smoking a long pipe outside a dingy-looking building.

  ‘Horishi?’ said Mattie. ‘Irezumi?’

  It seemed like the fellow had not heard Mattie at first, or at least not understood him, for there was a long pause while he inhaled another heavy swig of tobacco smoke and then, without looking at Stephen or Mattie or the building he sat in front of, he waved a finger at the door and they took that as their invitation to enter.

  Inside they found a large room, the walls of which looked like tattooed skin, covered as they were with all manner of coloured prints of demons and dragons and so on. It made Stephen’s flesh itch.

  A flickering red lantern gave a kind of movement to these painted monsters and made them seem to shimmer and twitch and shudder; sweat began to bead on Stephen’s forehead – and he could see the same was true of Mattie, however tough he talked.

  It was so dark that it was a little while before they realised that anyone else was there. In fact Stephen started and gave a gasp as a man loomed slowly out of the shadows and asked them in English what they wanted.

  ‘Irezumi,’ Mattie said again, which by now Stephen guessed must mean tattoo, and the man nodded and waved his
hand around at the surrounding pictures, inviting them to choose a design. Stephen’s eyes were more drawn to the collection of spikes and needles and sharpened bamboo that was laid out on a nearby table.

  Mattie walked up to the walls and then turned to him, grinning.

  ‘Look at these,’ he said excitedly. ‘I’m going to have me one of these here dragons on my back. How about you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stephen said. ‘I ain’t sure, Mattie.’

  Mattie chuckled. ‘You ain’t afeared now, are you, Stephen?’

  Stephen’s blushes were hidden by the all-embracing red glow from the lantern.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said defensively, if not quite convincingly. ‘I just don’t want one today.’

  ‘That’s fine by me, Stevie,’ said Mattie good-humouredly. ‘Next time, eh?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Stephen. ‘Next time.’

  All the while, their host was watching these exchanges with a smile of indeterminate emotion, a smile that made Stephen even more uneasy about the whole venture.

  The man nodded and led Mattie back to the table, where Mattie took off his jacket and shirt. Stephen was so unnerved by the whole atmosphere of the place that he almost decided to wait outside in the street, but he could not bring himself to leave Mattie with this sinister man.

  For he had assumed that this man was the tattooist, and was surprised when a curtain was suddenly pulled back and a beautiful woman stepped out from an adjoining room, her face as white as chalk, her lips blood red, her hair long and black and sleek as polished jet.

  She wore a long white silk gown that flowed on to the floor like milk and hid her feet, so that as she moved towards Mattie, she appeared to slide like a ghost. She led him to a kind of padded table where she bade him lie face down. With a small bow to Stephen she pulled a fine mesh curtain to screen them off, though she was still palely visible.