Robert W. Walker

by Zombie Eyes

  “No doubt the construction that has gone on around it all this decade has caused cracks and fissures throughout the stone casement,” said Wiz thoughtfully.

  “Careful, both of you,” said Leonard at the forefront. “Some tattered boards here; wouldn’t want anyone’s suit to be ripped.”

  “No nails,” said Wiz, staring at the rotting boards that Leonard had pointed out. “All held together by wooden pegs fashioned as nails. Amazing … to come so far…”

  “I’m afraid this is about as far as we go,” said Leonard, a sadness in his voice as he pointed out an area ahead that was impassable where tons of earth had fallen between the casement wall and the ship. “Only way to carry on is to excavate, make some tunnels.”

  “No time for that. We’re going to have to violate the ship,” said Wisnewski. “Perhaps here, where the rent has already begun. We loosen enough boards, we’ll be inside the hull, and if the planking has held, we may be lucky. We may learn something of this ship before Nathan and Gordon bury it forever.”

  “Isn’t there any other way?” Leonard said, taking Wiz aside. For some time they discussed the situation in heated whispers while Stroud went closer to the ship’s hull, which was caked in mud that had somehow filtered down through the cracks and the ages, in the wall that supposedly encased the entire ship, stem to stern, according to Wisnewski.

  What kind of a people took a ship this size, sailed in it before the time of Christ to the American continent, sank an enormous hole in the earth and buried it, surrounding it with a stone wall that pyramided over it?

  Stroud was shaken and amazed at the enormity of the event which had been lost to the ages. The questions the ship left swimming about his mind were staggering, but they all boiled down to why … why?

  Leonard was still arguing with Wisnewski. “There must be a way to get in without destroying the ship.”

  “Time, Leonard … we haven’t the luxury … And what of those poor devils with the curse of this thing feeding on them? Are they any less important than the find itself? We must be practical, for—”

  “In the face of this,” Leonard said, waving his arm, “you talk of being practical?”

  “Stroud, you tell this fool! Tell him what will happen if we don’t take the initiative. You’ve dealt with men like Gordon before, haven’t you?”

  “Most recently in Egypt, yes.”

  “Then tell him I’m right. We must go through here now.”

  “Within the constraints of time we have, that is very sound reasoning, Doctor,” said Stroud.

  “Agreed, then, Leonard?”

  “Yes, we go through here.”

  “Once on the inside, every precaution must be taken,” said Wiz when Stroud said, “Shhh! Did you hear that?”

  The other two men stared in his direction.

  “Thought I heard something.”

  Wisnewski immediately asked the people upstairs if they had detected anything on the sensitive monitoring equipment they were using. A voice came back saying, “Yes, a slight vibration. It may be unsafe for you men to be—”

  But they were cut off by a tremendous groan that welled up from the earth like a gas pocket trying to blow. It shook the casing wall and the floor on which they stood and it caused the big ship to irk and irk with the sound of a wounded animal until suddenly it stopped as quickly as it had begun. Stroud felt its soniclike vibrations continue inside his head.

  “In God’s name,” said Leonard.

  “What was that?” asked Wiz. “Earth tremor?”

  Stroud thought he saw something out of the side of his eye, but then it was gone. He feared saying anything about it, and he feared not. “Something just ran along the shadows there,” he finally said.

  “What? An animal?”

  “A rat? I hate rats,” said Leonard.

  “Not sure … seemed large for a rat.”

  “Shall we investigate?”

  “Negative,” said someone from above. “Tape from Stroud’s camera confirms a rat.”

  “I think I smell a rat,” added Leonard.

  “We’re in need of a few picks,” Wiz told the men topside. “Please dress someone properly, send the picks down.”

  “Are you sure we should proceed if the earth is unstable beneath our feet, Wiz?” asked Stroud.

  “Sometimes it takes an act of faith, doesn’t it, old boy?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Time is not on our side, Dr. Stroud.”

  “Then we go inside.”

  “Who would have ever guessed it?” said Stroud. “A ship beneath Manhattan, buried here so very long ago.”

  “Oh, then you haven’t seen our tract on the Tyger and other such finds?” asked Leonard.

  “No … no, I’m afraid I did not see it.”

  “It took many years of painstaking work,” he replied, using his nose to try to push his glasses up. This attempt, beneath the face mask that he wore, gave him a comical appearance.

  Wisnewski and Leonard were well known for having worked on any number of ships discovered, several out at sea, some abroad. They knew how to bring up the wood, keep it protected. Such work took years upon years, for the wood had to remain in electrically charged fresh water and all the porous interior holes bored by worms and time shot full with a hardening agent, even before reassembly could begin.

  “What are you saying, Dr. Leonard? What’s this Tyger you speak of?”

  “Tell him, Wiz.”

  “It’s not the first ship to be discovered under Manhattan,” said Wiz to Stroud. “Not by a long shot.”

  “There have been others?” Stroud was astounded by this information. They stood just inside the cavernous opening at the bow of the ship, awaiting the materials they’d requested.

  “Oh, nothing quite as elaborate as this, of course, but some old ships, yes, dating back to the early 1600s even.”

  “I see.”

  “Nothing on this scale, however,” emphasized Dr. Leonard, still aghast just looking at the exposed bow.

  “Galley ships were discovered by workmen building the Cortlandt Street station on the Interborough Rapid Transit line near the southern tip of the island.”

  “It was a Dutch ship, the Tyger” Leonard said. “Entirely different construction.”

  “Records showed that the Tyger burned and sank along the Hudson River coast in 1613.”

  “Our site here is more like the Dollar Drydock Savings Bank construction,” added Leonard. “They’d proposed construction of an office tower at the corner of Broad and Pearl streets—”

  “Across from the restored Fraunces Tavern—”

  “Where Washington bid farewell to his officers in 1783,” Stroud interrupted with a smile behind his protective mask. “I know the area. Site of the city’s first two city halls.”

  “Dutch Stadt Huys,” said Wiz.

  “1642 to 1697,” Leonard fished the dates from his memory.

  “And the English Lovelace Tavern, which was pressed into service as the administrative offices between 1670 and 1706,” Wiz said, gaining on Leonard.

  “At any rate, early Dutch construction techniques involved the use of old ships to create landfill, to extend the land base of the island as they did in Holland. Many of the recent finds have been of ships intentionally sunk to create walls for the landfill.”

  “Scuttled is the word for it,” said Wiz. “A spectacular merchant vessel was unearthed at 175 Water Street in ‘82. It was carbon-dated to 1745.”

  “The bow is on exhibit at the Maritime Museum at Newport News, Virginia—”

  “But her stern and a portion of the starboard remain buried under Front Street,” continued Wiz, “between the intersections of Fletcher and John streets.”

  “You gentlemen were involved in the excavation?”

  “Indeed, we were.”

  “Analysis of the wood showed that the ship was built from timbers from the Chesapeake Bay area by shipwrights here in the English tradition,” said Leonard, a pr
ide exuding through his space suit.

  “It was pockmarked by bore worms,” added Wiz, “indicating that it had sailed the waters of the West Indies for a considerable time.”

  “But how did you keep the construction halted long enough to—”

  “Fortunately, and only recently, work in the Lower Manhattan area has been conducted under the terms of the 1977 City Environmental Quality Review Act, which we have to keep invoking to poke and prod people with.”

  “The act requires developers like Gordon to conduct archeological and related environmental studies prior to being issued construction and occupancy permits for their sites,” explained Leonard.

  “Only problem is Gordon did a half-assed job of it, using amateurs, paying off politicians.”

  “Where are those damned picks?” Stroud wondered aloud.

  “One thing’s certain, this here ship is twice, perhaps three times the size of the Tyger” Wiz said, going to the bow and caressing it with a light touch that still caused a layer of the rotting timbers to come away with his gloved hand.

  “Careful, Wisnewski!” Leonard scolded his colleague and friend, but Wiz seemed now lost in thought, an eerie, mad look flitting across his face which vanished with the noise of someone’s approach, rattling the requested tools.

  Along with two picks and shovels were a few sticks of dynamite, which Wiz promptly, and in no uncertain terms, refused and sent back. “We’re not here to destroy either ourselves or the integrity of this grand ship,” he told the men aboveground while Stroud went to work with a pickax. The claw dug into the spongy, ancient wood like a battering ram against cardboard, and soon the three men were using their gloved hands, setting aside the assault weapons the axes had become. A man-sized hole was necessary and the black maw gaping back at them from the interior of the ship grew larger and larger, looking as if it welcomed swallowing them whole. They had to be certain no splintering pieces could catch on their suits and cause tears. The greatest fear at this point was being contaminated with whatever had plagued the old man named Weitzel, the guard and the two policemen, all of whom were in a state of unconsciousness, languishing in hospital beds.

  On their return there would be an irradiation shower to destroy any bacterium or spore that might cling to their bodies. The portable decontamination unit was in position now just below street level.

  The three of them stared at the empty well of darkness before them. The hull of the ship, the very bottom, the hold. Stroud wondered if it still contained any of its original cargo, whatever that might be. He wondered if they would find treasures and jewels, but he’d settle for Etruscan pottery, amphorae, tools, artifacts of this sort. Leonard flashed a light into the interior from which emanated a stench so powerful it threatened to send them back. The light strobed over bundles and boxes and barrels ostensibly filled with rotted matter, rotten flax and other grains, rotten fish in salted kegs and something akin to the smoldering odor of rotting flesh that Stroud had come to know during his tour of duty in Vietnam.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Leonard, whose eyes darted behind him. “That’s no goddamned rat.”

  “What? What did you see?”

  “Same thing Stroud saw, I think … but it wasn’t any rat like I’ve ever seen. Looked like it had more than four legs.”

  Stroud went toward the area that Leonard pointed to, but he saw nothing; not until his light brought into focus the footprints, or more appropriately, the claw prints of a rather large centipede. “Look at this, Dr. Wisnewski.”

  Wisnewski did so.

  “What do you suppose could make such a track?”

  “Nothing in my experience.”

  “Leonard? Leonard? Where is he?”

  They looked around to find Leonard gone. He had entered the hull alone. Wisnewski hurried through, catching Leonard’s silhouette ahead of him in his light while Stroud grabbed the only pickax left. Leonard had taken the other one.

  Stroud rushed through, catching up to Wisnewski at the moment his light picked up the fact that Leonard was tearing away at the wall in front of him. It gave way easily and then Leonard’s ax came back over his shoulder with a large bone stuck to it moments before the wall caved in in front of the doctor, burying him in human bones, sending up a scream from him.

  Stroud and Wiz rushed to his aid, trying to tug him free from the avalanche of bones.

  “God damn it!”

  “Helllllp!”

  The hull echoed with their shouts and at the same instant Stroud saw something leap onto Wisnewski’s back. It was hairy and multilegged with enormous eyes that glowed red in the dark, its spindly claws and teeth trying to rend Dr. Wisnewski’s suit as if it wished to burrow in. Stroud back-handed the demon and when his gloved hand touched it, it left a searing smoke on the glove. Stroud threw down the ax claw at it immediately, missing as it scurried into the blackness. A second such creature scampered over the bones and came at Leonard’s helmeted face. Wiz lifted a femur and knocked the creature hard into the wall of the ship. A third demonic menace was now on Stroud’s shoulder, digging in with its teeth for the throat. Stroud grabbed it about the scrawny neck and held it up for the point of the pickax that he rammed into its throat. This caused the thing to go up in a ball of flame that burned nothing but itself, a kind of spontaneous combustion, making Stroud drop it. No blood, no bodily juices, just this: flame that burned out as quickly as it appeared, leaving an ashen outline of the living thing that had attacked him.

  “Jesus! Jesus!” Wiz was pulling Leonard free of the heavy bones and skulls covering him.

  “You getting this above? Above, are you reading this?” Stroud pleaded without answer. “We’ve been cut off. We’ve got to get out of here, Dr. Wisnewski, retreat, now!”

  “Better part of valor, yes, quite agreed.”

  Leonard regained his feet and his composure and they started back the way they’d come. All around them they heard the scratching, ratlike noises of the creatures that had attacked them. Stroud feared they would be defenseless against an army of such creatures, and he feared that the ones that had been brave enough to attack had torn a hole in one or more of their suits, thus exposing them to whatever deadly germ lay down here with the corpses of what must be literally hundreds of ancients.

  “What the hell are those things?” Leonard wanted to know.

  “Devils of some sort,” said Wiz, breathing heavily. “Lesser demons, the pets of a more powerful demon.”

  “Demons,” panted Leonard, “demons protecting an ancient ship, cursing those who dare come near it, and we’re inside the damned thing, breaking down walls … my God.”

  “Hurry!” Stroud shouted at the porthole, helping the others through as he looked back into the darkness where a thousand pairs of red eyes stared back at him. The eyes were dizzying in their number and movement, as if they were revolving, and behind each pair of eyes was a monkey-rat with six legs and horrid claws and gnashing teeth. Had these demons fed on the men whose bones had somehow come to this end? Who was this sacrificial crew placed aboard a ship sunk in the earth forever, until now?

  Stroud, following the other two now, staving off the red eyes that moved on them, saw that Wiz held several of the bones in his hands as he rushed along. Leonard had something in his hand as well, some kind of parchment. Both men had noticeable rents to their protective wear, as did Stroud himself. They’d lost two of the lights and one of the picks inside the strange ship filled with apparitions and demonic creatures.

  Just outside, at the tunnel mouth, they agreed to explain away their difficulties inside on the basis of structural collapse. At this point in time, it seemed useless to speak of demonic power emanating from the ship, so powerful that it could affect the human mind. What worried Stroud, however, was the very real possibility that they might all die with the information locked inside them, given the nature of the beast and the fact they had come into contact with it. Would they now become human vegetables like the others? Earlier, rumors had come t
hat even more cases of the rare disease were quickly filling up the hospital beds about the city. If so, they must put down their findings in writing, and quickly.

  Yet Stroud felt no illness, no slowing down of his mental faculties. Still, as with Weitzel, it might come on gradually like a creeping disease, slowly taking over his mind. The idea was enough to frighten even Abraham Stroud. “If I become a zombie, please see to it that my life is terminated,” he told the other two men as the crowd overhead cheered them on toward the decontamination chamber set up outside the pit.

  Wiz and Leonard agreed, only if he’d do the same for them.

  The light rain had continued, and for some unaccountable reason it was creating a misty steam about the three men as it made contact with their protective clothing. The fog seemed to be seeping from them, and it smelled rank with sulfur.

  Wiz held tightly to the samples of bone he had in his possession, and the bones, too, were smoldering with a weird, unnatural steam rising off the surface. Leonard quickly tucked the parchment he held inside his clothing, trying to protect it from the rain, fearful of it going up in smoke.

  They stepped into the decontamination chamber one at a time, as it was no larger than a telephone booth. Wiz went first, hugging his bones. The irradiation shower was quick and painless and a man on the other side awaited with clothing for Dr. Wisnewski, who’d packed his showered protective wear in a disposable box inside the unit. Wiz was talking animatedly, in “high gear” on the other side, when Leonard went through the shower. Stroud was fatigued and thought of a real shower of warm water, while he waited patiently for Leonard; but Leonard didn’t come out when the door on the other side opened. Men had to go in and help him out. He was being placed on a stretcher while the terrified Wiz looked on, and while Stroud, taking a deep breath, stepped into the chamber.

  Inside, Stroud was instructed to remove the protective wear. There was a cushioned hanger on which to place the suit, and a chute through which it was to be placed after the bombarding rays hit it. Stroud felt like a microwave meal as the machine burned away bacteria on his epidermis, in his hair and pores, leaving a layer of white dust—dead cells—all over his body, along with a tingling, burning feeling. He wiped his white-powdered eyelids with his white-powdered hands. A jolt of unspeakable pain tore through the passages of his brain.