by Jeff Kamen
An hour later the sails were snapping flat, the mast creaking sharply in the blocks. A foul rain was sweeping across the deck, and with a string of curses he went stumbling about trying to tie off the lines as they whipped loose. Drenched, his clothes hanging on his body like animal skins, he looked about helplessly as the deck lunged and rolled, the raised prow continuing to smash its way through the wrathful churning seas. Stumbling back to the fastened tiller, he grabbed at a swinging rope and hung onto it to regain his bearings, his breath. Then something huge crossed the sky in great flashing freights and vanished deep into tunnels of darkness. Black thunder broke out overhead, one crash following another, and tingling, staring around in dull fascination, he saw within the turning clouds a strange and threatening carousel.
Within it horned figures were riding merrily, their heads thrown back in peels of baleful laughter. He wiped his eyes, slapping the water away, but the image remained, pounding and flickering. ‘Come on, then,’ he growled, his enemy revealed at last, ‘you want me? Eh? You want me? Then let’s see what you’ve got.’
The ship was lifting. He rode out this sickly elevation in a dying haze of light and went lurching to the mast and wrapped his arms around it, clinging on as large waves came crashing over the deck, carrying away loose crates and baskets. He looked from side to side, gasping, but the figures in the carousel were still riding round, figures that were jester-like and oddly malformed, electrically distorted as though buzzing there on a screen. A moment later he cried aloud, for among the figures was his mother as he’d last seen her alive, pale and calm, talking to him softly. He blinked in the reach and attack of lightning, his face locked in bewilderment, in fear. Then he yelled again, for round in the flashing sky went Paget and Kol. His father was there too, moving sidelong and partly obscured, along with Karoly and Sylvie and Lütt-Ebbins. He saw Cora, saw Stoeckl, saw the fisher families, saw his father there, sad and reaching, and he looked round sharply, thinking he’d seen him once before, but the other bearded figure he’d seen continued away dimly with his face averted.
The carousel continued, the figures rocking back and forth in their mirth, mocking him with their smiles and their deep sockets wrathfully aflicker; sockets guttering like the fires at the foot of a bubbling black lake. Among the creatures he saw then, he spotted the horned beast who had chased him that awful day, and he raised his finger at it in terrified accusation, his wet hair streaming in the wind. The creature’s yellow gaze was fixed hard and cruel upon him and he screamed shrilly and the tall Genetik woman was there and the old woman dying in childbirth, holding the infant in her arms, and there were people on fire in waterfalls and there were wild seas of flame bursting from behind the peaks like some other kind of birth, so terrible it was, so terrible, as if Death itself had been strapped down and forced into labour, rendering long screams of lament, screams paralysing to all who beheld it, screams like some unholy horror of anguish, the universe shuddering in its own failing clutches as had the first fire escaping from that undivided seed at the earliest of all origins, a fire like the greatest love exploding sun on sun until all things that were or would ever be came searing out eternally.
The ship tilted aside in cold tons of water, creaking and shaking, and as the water drained from the deck with a long rolling hiss, he cried out again and clung on all the tighter. The ship tilted once more, tilted and then plunged, and he stared down into the long ribbed throat of the sea as it gaped open. Then it slowly crashed in on itself, waves rolling over one another in an inward avalanche that pushed the ship aside and tossed it on like driftwood.
And it was as he clung there swinging that he let go of all resistance and found himself entering the hole in the rock. Found himself being dragged through the dark to where the hideous figures were gathered, reddish in the firelight, unearthly all.
‘No ...’
To where lay a babe in arms kicking in a blanket. Next to which, sprawled upon a nap of fur, was a tiny shambles of dried-up flesh.
‘No ... no ....’
They were working quickly. What they did to the infant in slaying it set him to wailing long and high. Then he saw himself being pushed and pulled about, while away from him the blood was being worked into a hellish red lather upon the dried-up meat and bones. All the while a grim snorting and cackling came from the loathsome party, until at last something began to bubble. To move. The wet bones beginning to stir and shudder.
The voices then hurrying each other on and him being dragged a little closer, pricked with a knifepoint as a flesh-coated creature hissed to life within that flickering ring, a creature that cruel and slathered hands moulded and shaped with a foul litany of words dripped over it until its limbs seemed to move more ably. A creature whose tiny head began twisting about on its wrinkled neck as though straining to give voice to its existence.
And what then for him.
Screwing up his eyes against the spray, he heard a rough voice say, Make it quick. Puttem together. Can’t wait no longer.
Aint allowed. Father’s not here to witness.
That’s his problem. Time’s nigh. Just get this done.
What if he rejects the host?
Who? This littlun?
The father. What if he rejects it? Changes his mind?
Gah.
It’s been known. Delicate work this. There’s things at —
Fuckery. The host’s his choice. Puttem together now. Make em one.
He ought to be here.
Aye. And he’s not. Gone missing.
Missing?
So it’s on us to do it, and do it we will. Now get it done.
Yes yes you’re the brave one now, but ...
Then yet another voice replying, guttural and raw. Feeling his jacket pulled from his body and his hair slicked back by wet pawing motions as the gurgling infant was carried across and placed with its face to his back.
Feeling something searing, burning into him. A hot and terrifying merging. Sharp fingers kneading them together and images flashing through his skull of a life unknown to him — and then as they poured yet more blood from the dead child over the one they’d revived, the sound of an explosion.
The figures stopping at once, turning. A pinpoint of flame appearing for a second, then retreating. Then coming again as a second explosion shook the earth, causing lumps to fall from the fissured roof.
Hot flames corkscrewing towards them and the spooked figures rising, barking and hooting in dismay. Then yet another detonation thumping the air and shaking the tunnel. All then fleeing with the infant they’d evoked, running with wild malevolence in their eyes, a hairy and covered host that lurched away to side turnings and ways off from the passage as the flames darted nearer. He with an arm across his face grabbing at his things and dropping, tumbling backwards and down, throwing himself to the murky water as the redness brightened and disappeared.
Then, with a great crash, a wall of rock coming down and him floundering, entombed and alone, gasping for help.
All held within a chamber of rock like a keyhole slowly receding as the rain pelted his brow and the chill waves flooded over his legs. He searched around himself, coughing, blinking the water away. Then he looked up.
‘You want me now?’ he screamed, waving the bottle. ‘That wasn’t enough, was it? You want me now? You want to take me? Take what’s yours? Is that it? Well, come on! Come on then, just do it, you sorry bastard!’
He cried out again, elbow locked around the mast, and in his despair he kicked at the water and lay breathlessly waiting for the next onslaught. The sails were billowing about in riflecracks and down below he could hear his goods smashing and breaking apart. It seemed just a matter of time before the vessel overturned and was dragged away beneath the ocean.
The storm was raging with a violence he’d never known. As if the open seas had ushered something else into the world. The winds slavering, the wild waves unleashed.
‘Damn you,’ he roared, ‘just get it done with,’ and as i
f to assist his tormentor with the killing of a man, he managed to pull himself upright. Heaving at the lines, he looked out at the flashing night to scream at it in final outrage, and then whatever it was that struck him swung silently from behind.
He fell down the ladder opening and struck the floor and lay there in the wet with the taste of blood in his mouth. His eyes dimming as the bottle rolled away, glass hammering on metal on metal on metal into the flickering dark.
Chapter 84 — Eaten
Throwing back the sleeve, she entered the back off the footplate. She went inside and reached for the handle and dragged the trunk towards her, surprised at its weight.
It had lain untouched for weeks under some covers and she noticed there was more rust on it. Raw orange rings, flaky patches of brown. After hauling it to the edge, she eased it to the ground and worked the lid loose.
As the lid opened, the smell that rose up at her made her gasp, but it was the sight of the merchant’s bag, eaten and empty, that had her searching further below. What she saw down there, sitting heavy and full beneath the pullulating worms, made her cry out in a way that brought Radjík running round with a knife drawn.
‘What’s happened?’ she said.
‘Dig,’ Jaala said urgently, ‘quick, we need to dig,’ dragging the trunk after her, and as she hauled it away, she raised her head and cried out in that other’s language to the limits of the sky.
Chapter 85 — On The Hill
He twitched. For a moment he thought something had brushed against his hand. Something soft, gentle, featherlike. But when he looked around the hold he saw nothing there. He lay a while holding his throbbing head, then looked up to find a nitrous blue sky framed by the opening. He stared deeply into it, uneasy in his recollections, uneasy in the silence, then he rolled over and returned to sleep.
When he woke again, it was with the realisation that he was not moving. The ship was utterly still. As if locked in place.
On climbing the ladder, stiff and sluggish, he peered out to find himself beached upon a sandy shore. The ship was wedged at an angle but the deck was level enough for him to walk upon.
He stood among the tangled lines and the boom half severed and hanging at an angle and looked out to sea. Somehow he’d come in around the remains of an industrial works; some kind of processing plant or refinery. The dead site covered several acres in all, much of it licked hollow or swept away so that what was left hung together as a great sprawling basketry of corroded odds and ends. There were parts of tall piers jutting up in solitary configurations, all bloodred with rust. Steel pinnacles weeping into concrete. The chewed shapes of what had been pipelines and wellheads and enormous cylindrical containers. Things which had once moved or shunted in powerful rhythms and steaming clangs and roars now clung together in oxidised lumps and scabs. All of it suspended across the shallows like a monster lying in a bath, its lower parts creaking sombrely.
He looked over the deck again, half-heartedly kicking away the debris, the dried wracks of salty weeds and silt. He stood shaking his head. An anchor was missing. The rails buckled out of shape. The sails hung torn and lifeless, wrapped around the spars. He returned below and drank water and dressed the gash on his head. Then he curled up in a sheet and lay like this until sleep returned.
The next time he awoke it was night. Once more he thought something featherlike had brushed against him. He peered about in the darkness but there was nothing there, nor when he tentatively called out, hearing his voice recede down the tragic compartments of the hold, there to die away.
There to taunt him. He sat up.
Night and himself alone. The horrible cries of the storm were returning, and there was no denying them and no denying what he knew. Pale and harrowed, he crawled around searching through the soaking wreckage until he came to his mirror. Then, with a sensation akin to deserting himself, being forced against his will, he propped up the intact shard that remained in place, and by the light of a dented lamp, he turned aside. He peered with caved sockets over his shoulder and raised his shirt. Then he raised it a little more, shuddering, and on finding the impression of a raw little face among the scars, he went reeling into the bulkhead, where he clung on gasping, his appalled eyes shut against what he’d seen.
Hours later he was slumped down beside the liquor keg, trying with each swallow to rid himself of what he knew. But the images would not leave and would not leave and by dawn he was lying there weeping, for himself, for the slaughtered infant, and for the newly waked thing they’d carried away with grunts and howls as the rock walls shook and collapsed.
By the time a shaft of light stood in the hold, he was sitting grey-faced and very still, almost stonelike in the knowledge he held and in his inability to know what to do with it. His sense of how to progress from there. How to live, and how to move among men with any sense of normality. He watched the steam rising from the floor, and then kneeling in the vapour, he reached out with a groan, picturing himself setting off again to wander the seas and winds — a man doomed to rove about maddened and helpless and slave to the whim of passing years, until in a bolt of terror he was claimed at last and wrenched down to the netherworld from which he’d sprung.
Aghast he sat there, and his hand returned to his face, pulling at his mouth as he sought alternatives.
And were he not to sail, what then? Was he to lie in the damp and simply give up on himself? Lie there rotting in his bones? Awaiting crabs and birds to dispose of him? No more advanced in his situation than when he’d sat in a tree with a noose around his neck?
Thoughts of growing despair were in his mind when something went fluttering through the light. He turned. It vanished again, but not before he’d spotted it, and he watched as it circled the clouded depths of the hold, only to disappear once more. Curious, blinking gloomily, he was about to go after it when he heard a fluttering at his side, and when he looked, an identical creature flitted away from him like a runaway slip of paper. He followed it as it fluttered around his quarters and as it flitted back again, this time to alight on a ladder rung, where it quivered timidly.
Then he looked up. Others were flying down through the hatch. Some flew away into the hold and some alighted on the ladder as the first one had, going from rung to rung as if to explore them the better before committing themselves to land. Those that found a place to perch did so with their pale wings trembling over their bodies like large eyelids. When another came fluttering towards him, he hunched as it circled his head, not wanting to harm it, get in its way, and as it came nearer still, he put out his hand, surprised to find it alight upon his fingers. There it remained as he brought it closer for examination.
It stood with its wings half folded, rustling, quivering. Weightless and so very fragile. He peered beneath it, studying the fine network of capillaries of its near-translucent wings, studying its body. Then he frowned, turning it and turning it again, amazed to find that its twig-like physique held no discernible organs or other parts: it had no legs or feelers, nothing to feed or mate with, no sign of a tail or antennae; nothing at all. And yet it was so vibrantly alive. As it flew away he watched it a few moments, then he turned to watch the creatures sitting on the rungs. He lifted his hands to them, marvelling as they came down to him, as they darted and flitted all around. Something about them was making him feel lighter, the dread mood slipping free, and as he continued to observe them, standing with his hands raised and his eyes constantly exploring, the pained, drawn expression that had been etched into his features for so many months began to retreat a little, to soften.
~O~
He climbed to the deck to see where they were coming from. There was a ridge overlooking the shore and they seemed to be billowing over it from somewhere inland. He searched for a path leading up to the ridge but there was none, just stones and rocks and dried-up flotsam.
For a while he stood following the flutterers, then he looked over the water, out past the skeletal joins and the scoured and empty drums. Once more tryi
ng to picture himself sailing: leaning on the tiller post, drifting on the waves to the very limits of sanity. Chased by storms and the onset of weary seasons, alone and howling, tortured with regret. Tortured by a past that no other would believe in. Separated, different to all those he met with, different to everything he saw or knew.
He looked down pensively, gazing at his shadow upon the pitted steel.
Later that day he built a small fire in a dent in the deck and cooked small fish in the coals. He spent the evening reflecting on it all. The flutterers soothed him as he explored his thoughts, and he sat there holding out his hands and welcoming them, beckoning them towards him as they billowed out to sea. Beyond the darkening spiral of their silhouettes, he watched the sun melt like a ball of wax into a sea of purple flames.
All night he sat there. Contemplating issues of loss and gain and origin. Of destiny. Of worth.
Time and again he tried to picture himself returning to Cora. Each time he did, he was going to his knees and letting it all come rambling out — telling her of the man who had died and been buried at the cliffs, telling of his months of suffering, his misguided routes onwards and down. Telling her of the incarnate horrors which had seized him repeatedly since he’d fled Van Hagens, of forces and matters he did not himself comprehend, yet was certain that somehow she would ...
But as his thoughts travelled out to her, seeking comfort, he saw that even were he to return, they might still be forced apart.
... he’s to get the other stone from the mountain ...
... keep it dry at all times and free from pollutants ...
Words that had never reached their destination. Never made it to the avuncular old man left swinging from a rope. Yet words he could not hide from. That gave guidance to all he was.
