“What business have you there?” he asked in rotten French, thickened by his Frisian tongue.
“Our own,” said I.
He understood my reticence. “We do not go there very much,” he replied.
“There are villages there,” I said. “Is there no trade?”
A peculiar mien settled upon him, and he shook his head at me slowly, biting upon his lip. “We do not go there, but they trade here, from time to time. One of them is here now.”
How odd, that he should say so with such tremulous voice, I thought. “You will not take us?”
“I will not.”
“Then two silver pennies if you take us to the one who hails from there.” To this he agreed and led us to a small rowing boat where an ill-favoured, stooped fellow with a peculiar look about the eyes slopped out fish scales from an emptied barrel. Our Samaritan acting as translator, the stooped fellow refused us passage. But then Baines stepped forward and showed to him a curious medal of greenish gold, whereupon he agreed to carry us over water to Scheermonnikoog for fivepence, for he said he dwelled there and must return for the night. An outrageous fee, but it was not to be helped. Passage purchased, we left Zoutkamp. It was a miserable village, and I was not sorry to see it behind me. The place was burned by pirates at the beginning of the Spanish war, and only recent taken back from Catholics. The fort is much rundown, but full to misery with soldiery. Merchants might make merry at a like garrison’s presence, but not the villagers, who looked upon the State’s Soldiery askance, ever worried for their daughters. Baines and I were obliged to hide ourselves from their notice. Soon enough, news of two Englishmen in port would reach unwelcome ears, and I designed to be away before it was. There was no time to be had for wrangling with authority.
Out, out over the heaving sea, past mudflats haunted by the shrieks of lonely birds, too akin to ghosts. Once salt was made in old Zoutkamp, but the little ponds, all walled about with dykes, were clogged by mud and no more used, their gates broken. An air of dejection hung over all, so different to the bustle of the Dutch cities, whose vitality makes the heart of a man run quick. These drear places are great in number, and reflect the soul of that strange nation more than Amsterdam or Haarlem. Mark that well, should you ever come to that land.
The hunched man rowed us over, bent double and staring at the strakes. As he pulled hard upon his oars, I could not help but observe him. His eyes were bulbous, unto that of a frog or cod, and his breath came all wet and rasping. Long sleeves covered the twain of his hands, but once chance permitted a short viewing, and I saw that partway up his finger’s length were webs. I have seen this before on blighted men, but this was different. No aberration of the human form, it was rather natural in its unnaturalness, if you apprehend my meaning, as if such webbing was fit to him as my feet are fit to me or the webbing of a goose’s foot is fit to the goose.
As we proceeded over the waves, the steady knock of water upon the wood sounding an unfriendly beat, an unsettling sense came upon me. The more I stared at this man, the more I became convinced he was not a man at all, but something other. Mayhap you think that the cold must have affected my wits, for cold it was. Wind of such frigidity blew upon us from the north, biting at our exposed flesh with teeth of ice. I yearned for a heavier cloak. My face was soon blasted raw, and in the tips of their gloves my fingers lost all feeling. But it was not the cold, and nor were my wits addled. The man was not right.
He rowed us straight to the shore. The boat rasped hard upon the sand and he leapt nimbly into the water. Though crook-backed, he was strong and hauled the boat from the ocean, I and Baines within, untroubled by difficulty. I paid him his fee. He said nothing, but watched us with those hideous protuberances as we departed the beach.
If the lands around Zoutkamp were desert and poorly suited to human life, that of Scheermonikoog was by far the less desirable.
A rolling place of shifting sand, treacherous in footing, more beholden to Neptune’s law than any rule of man. Five of the clock came and went by as we reached the centre of the shaggy heath that made the isle’s heart. On all sides the pounding of the waves, relentless in their monotony, beat out a march. No effort of any magician could have brought on such a melancholy of the soul as the sound of that thumping on the sand.
We gained the highest point of the island; a poor peak no more than a dozen feet tall. Three villages around the edges gave themselves away as lanterns blinked yellow eyes at the drawing of the night. Baines pointed to the north, where the isle narrowed and took on a curled shape, like that of a tadpole. The tattered dunes that way were black, no light I beheld, but that was where he indicated nonetheless.
“Whither are we to go?” I said.
“The monastery,” he said. “A ruin. That is where the meeting is to be held.”
“At what hour?” I asked.
With level stare he did respond, “Midnight, Mr Marley, when else?”
Darkness dropped, heavy as velvet curtains. The dunes increased their efforts to drag at our feet. The moon was a way from rising, and the world was reduced to the hiss of sand, the boom of surf, black land and black water, the uncertain, ever-changing border sketched in dim white.
“We are here,” said he. “Quietly now.”
He led me to the brink of a dune and before us was a monastery church’s tower, standing tall from fields on which the sands had already greatly encroached. This half of the church was well rooted in the turf, but the hind parts, the nave and the most part of the apse, had been washed clean away. The black shadow of walls broke in the water, cut clean. Extant blocks broke the paleness of the beach, and tumbled masonry made a little reef in the roil of the surf. The footings there were buried in the sand. Half the remaining building was in the ocean, half upon the shore. Doors of greyly-weathered oak barred the way into the tower from the landward side.
“Monks were here since King Stephen’s time,” Baines explained. “Until Papacy was overthrown in these lands. When the storming of the churches was done, this one and its brothers hereabouts survived the breaking, only for a storm to rise ten years to the day since the first statue was wrested off its perch in Antwerp, and all the monastery save this ruin and its tower carried off to the deeps by the wrath of God.’”
“On whose side does God’s wrath fall?” I asked. I had no truck with such superstition, not least from Baines, who I held to be a monstrous Catholic, no matter how often he states himself being the contrary, an opinion I was soon to revise. “On the side of the Papists, or that of the Calvinists?” Baines scowled at me.
We had many hours to pass, so we ate and pissed and took our rest. We lit a small fire, which the wind beat at with gusting fists until it was small and cowed and incapable of shedding warmth. When the wind died a moment, it roared up high, and forced us back, and so no comfort could be got.
The moon emerged from racing clouds. I grew tired of Baines and the cold. I bade him stand and follow me into the church.
“We must wait!” he said, most agitated.
“We may as well stand as sit,” said I. The production of my sword sealed the argument in my favour.
The gates were locked and so we came in from the seaward side. The water crept up the beach, and would soon hold congregation within the ruin, but we entered without difficulty. The church retained some fitments of wood, much rotted, but present. The destruction appeared therefore recent though it was over twenty years wrecked, and so total in its exercise that the storm took full half the building down into the sea.
“Watch your feet,” I said to him, for there was much debris and sea-wrack about.
“We should not be in here!” said he, and a panic seized him, so that he became rooted as a tree, and I must poke him again unkindly to force his movement.
By the light of moon I examined carvings upon the antique pilasters. All were gargoyles of the most hideous sort, but of a type I have never seen in a church. Strange chimerae having features of man and fish, twining one around
another lasciviously, hunting the beasts of the ocean with long spears; dolphin-fish, the whale, and the seal. In one window shone fragments of glass. The light was so dim I could not clearly see, but there was an image held in the corner of the remainder, as is the habit of the Catholics, and I strained my eyes to perceive. A fat-bodied angel, I thought at first, for there was a spread of wings behind the figure. Then I espied the writhings of worms at its mouth, and drew back.
“What manner of church is this,” I said, much at unease, “that has devils in its windows?”
“One we should not set foot in,” he warned.
“There is a door there,” I said. I stepped over rotten boards and stinking seaweed to gain the drier end of the church and the safety of the tower. I stepped up to where uneven flagstones yet covered the earth, and I was gladdened by the feel of them under my feet. Forty feet further, and I was firmly upon solid earth, the tower overhead and the great doors before me. I could hardly credit that such a church might be so, one foot in the soil, the other in the sea, without collapsing to utter devastation long since. In the base of the tower were set a run of stairs. Those leading upward were open, but a rusting grate barred the portal down, a heavy lock upon it. Spiral steps led beneath to a crypt.
“What is down there?” I asked.
“We must leave!” he said, and plucked at my sleeve. He pointed out to sea. There was a ship of substantial beam, three-masted and rigged after the Dutch style, drawing close to shore and all lit up by lanterns. Borne by wind, I heard shouts and by moonlight beheld the movements of sailors in the ropes.
“We cannot be found inside!”
The ship halted, and the rattle of an anchor chain preceded the lowering of a jolly boat.
“We have to depart now!” said Baines, his voice all a-hiss.
“No,” said I. “You must go. I will secrete myself in the tower.” Baines blinked at me. “I have seen your medal,” I said. “I have none. What suppose you shall happen if I fail in the production of the same?”
“It is for the best,” he nodded rapidly, all too readily.
“Do not think of running, Baines, you must see this through or I shall know your story to be a base lie. If it proves so, I will chase you down, and deliver you to Burghley myself, and if you betray me to this anti-church, I shall make sure to kill you before I am undone.”
He exited the ruin backward, nodding and blinking all the while as his feet splashed in the nearing sea. I looked upward, and braved the stairs.
The stone steps were firm, but the wood of the tower floors much rotted, and I dared not try them. To the roof I went, where lead remained and kept the timbers sound. I lay myself behind the low parapet, and waited. I had a good view. The moon was at its highest, and I was enabled to see directly to the ship offshore and the boat filling now with figures.
A line of lights drew my eyes to the west, a procession of torches closing in on the ruined church. Baines may or may not have been telling me the entirety of the truth, but there was to be a gathering that night, that was apparent. The boat came first, making shore twenty yards up the beach from the church.
Seven figures came out, cowled and covered all over with robes, and the boat returned to the ship to repeat the journey, and repeat again, until twenty such stood on the shore. They took to themselves lanterns from their boat, and lit them in a huddle against the wind, then came laughing and jesting to their church from the landward quarter, unlocking and entering through the battered oak doors and passing under me and my hiding place.
For a moment I feared they might come up, so loudly did their voices boom in the hollow ruination of that fane, but they passed on, and out to the juncture of the floor twixt land and beach within the church, and arrayed themselves there. Their voices fell to silence one by one, and all became so quiet I could hear their robes fluttering as pennants in the breeze.
From afar, I heard a mournful chanting, and the rattle of irons. The torches drew closer so that I did perceive the faces of their bearers, all swart and ugly as the man who rowed us to that place. Three score, perhaps, or more. Amid them were seven who were not of the island, for they possessed not that piscean look, and they were bound in shackles, and greatly terrified. The islanders arranged themselves not within the church with the men, who appeared so juxtaposed against the islesmen to be much fairer and cleaner of limb than the Frisian wretches, but upon the shore, where they stood two ells between each of them, either side of the church.
They faced the water, so close to the sea that it ran up over their feet and they flinched not from the cold, but continued with their singing. All but seven, who led the youths inside from the broken end of the church. The tide now made its way from the lost altar to the tower, so that the youths’ feet were wetted by the ocean as much as their faces were by tears. They were Dutch and German youths, they cried out in those tongues, and some were girls and some were boys. Each was appointed a keeper, who led them upon a chained leash, and so they were arrayed before the men from the ship, who were twenty in number.
A twenty-first joined them, garbed likewise in the robes. Baines, for certainly it was he. I wondered to myself if he had other robes for me, or if he intended to betray me to these men after all, and if he would yet reveal my presence. They were no atheists, I determined. He said sorcerers, I recalled. I put small stock in the divine, but for these creatures it was not so; they were steeped in superstition. I looked upon a witch’s sabbath. With great care for the bluster of the wind on the pan, I primed Baines’s pistol, and put the spanner to the lock so to tighten it, muffling the sound of the device with my robes and hand.
The men upon the dry floor of the church spoke among themselves, several approached the man I was sure was Baines, and I heard English voices among High German, Low German and Dutch. A bundle was exchanged for a purse; the dies for coin. Then silence. The youths as made noise were beaten hard, and so we had more quiet, where the wind joined chorus with the islander’s dirge. The sea stole closer. Its many tongues lapped hungrily at the stones of the floor where the twenty-one men stood. I longed to drowse, but dared not, and kept my eye upon the church, and the islanders, and the sea. This last drew all my thought, for out beyond the ship appeared a glowing, as of candles behind glass, but in this instance under the water.
At some signal unseen by me, twenty of the twenty-one stepped back. The first, the nearmost to the sea, stepped instead to the fore, and placing one foot upon the sand of the beach within the church, and the other remaining upon the stone, raised his hands and cried out in an ungodly tongue whose sounds were unfamiliar and noisome to the ear. The islanders responded, then the rest of the twenty-one in their turn. He shouted again, something different but in equal measure vile, and again the phrase was repeated in two jarring rounds. I distinctly heard Baines’ voice among it. Baines was a devout man.
I could not believe that he might mum these words and remain in good conscience. He had come to these creatures not as spy, but as fellow. Was there anything he might not do? The more I lay there, the more likely it seemed that he was of this coven of diabolists and I might meet my end.
On this exchange went. From the sea came a response, a lowing song that ended in dire screeches. The lights in the water shone the brighter, and drew nearer to the shore. By now, I was making sense of the awful speech of the chief witch, and, allowing for my poor understanding, I might repeat it here.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Well might you shrink from it, or bare your teeth, Frizer, for it is a, dread speech. And I, who say no man should be beholden to the fear of hobgoblins, have tasted that fear.
Beyond the breaking of the waves, dark shapes moved, rolling in the sea. Dolphins, or the orcus, I thought, but no, these things had heads, and they rose as black orbs on the silver water, and then I thought seals, but no again, for they had arms and legs as men and they came forth out of the sea, walked upon land as men walk. They approached, passing through the cordon of islande
rs. They clicked and whistled as they passed, and the villagers called glad greetings. Then these mer-men passed within, and gathered in the church – twenty-one of them to the twenty-one robed landsmen.
Their leader came forward. I cannot drive the sight of it from my mind. If our boatman was a man with the look of a fish, then this creature was the reverse, a fish with the look of a man. He was scaled, with huge eyes that gleamed; bald, without nose or lips, and frills at his neck like a living ruff that rose and fell with his inhalations. It stood before the foremost man, and put one foot forward, so that it too had one foot on the land, the other in the foaming water of the high tide.
It spoke. Not human words, but speech of a sort, its voice more croaking than the most loathsome Dutch nightingale.
“Gold,” explained one of the islesmen beneath me, clearly, and in English. “Dominion.”
“Flesh!” said the chief warlock, and gestured extravagantly. “Flesh for the lords of Atlantis!”
The creature made much croaking and bowed, and the youths were pushed forward into the press of pisceans by the islesmen.
They stood unmoving around the youths, then all of a sudden fell upon them, rending their clothes unto their wearer’s nakedness, and then with thrusting members and gaping orifice they ravished them all, male and female alike, in the seething of the sea.
Such a savage mating, mercifully brief. The creatures cawed and made clicking in their throats, and whistled, and hooted out as they disported themselves and sated their lusts. So brightly did their teeth flash I thought they meant to consume the youths after their rapine, but they withdrew when they were finished, and the men and women were pulled weeping from the surf by the Frisians, and had blankets thrown about them. So they were led away. I heard the lock upon the gate, and clang shut moments later. I readied myself for the death of any man that might attempt the stair, but none came.
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 22
