The Night Boat

by Robert McCammon

Chapter Ten

 

  THE SQUARE-SHOULDERED black fisherman dealt cards to the four other poker players arranged around a central table in the Landfall Tavern. Evening was rapidly falling and the trawler crews had long since finished their labors. The place was now a maelstrom of noise and movement; on the other side of the plank-floored room a jukebox blared a raw, insistent reggae, and several of the men were trying unsuccessfully to get the bar girls to dance with them. It was Friday night, a time for drinking and wildness, tall tales, and an occasional fight to blow off steam, and with Saturday a market day the crews wouldn't be working until Monday. Cigarette smoke swirled above the men's heads, drawn by the lazily turning ceiling fans; glasses clinked against bottles, and there was a din of loud laughter and talking. On the rough plank walls tin signs advertising Red Stripe and Jaguar beers and Bacardi rums almost vibrated from the noise level. The card dealer settled back in his chair and calmly surveyed his hand. Then he looked from face to face, trying to read the other men's hands from their expressions. They had been playing for over an hour and he had won most of their money; he was feeling loose now, all good and warm inside. He had been drinking hard on purpose, hitting the rum bottle time after time, because he wanted to forget the stories he'd heard about that young buck Turk. He had played cards with the man here in this bar, on another Friday night, and thinking about the way Turk had died unsettled him. There was no sense to it, no reason for it at all. Now Turk was cold and dead, lying on a slab over at the clinic. The dealer reached over for his bottle and swigged again. Damn. Could have been anybody lyin' over there, he thought. Damn, it was a bad thing! He raised the rum bottle and took another slug; suddenly he didn't feel quite so warm after all.

  "Hell of a thing," James Davis said from across the table, throwing down a card. "I hear they find the boy with his head almos' cut off. God A'mighty, I'da hated to been the one who find him. God A'mighty. "

  Smithson shook his head. "No, mon. It was his back broke clean in two. Somebody got him in one hell of a hug. "

  "His head was split open," Youngblood told them over his cards. "I hear that from one of the doctor's nurses. He go messin' round that fuckin' boat and he find bad trouble. Me, I wouldn't go near that t'ing. "

  "What you know?" the dealer, a bulky man named Curtis, asked sharply. "Put down your money. "

  "It's trouble, thass what I know," Youngblood continued, throwing a few coins into the pot. "Been trouble since the white man brung it up. Me, I say take the thing out and get rid of the sonofabitch!"

  Percy leaned over the table, looking from one face to the next. "They say his eyes was starin', like he seen Death comin' for him," he whispered. "The talk's all over the yard. He seen Death reach out for him, and take him by the throat and. . . "

  "Stop that talk!" Curtis said.

  "Oh yah," said the other man. "If you doan believe a man can see his Death comin' then you crazy. That boy did and he die right there on the spot. I hope to God I never see it comin'. I hope it sneak up on me and take me from behind so I go quick. "

  "You crazy, mon!" Davis told him.

  "How many cards?" Curtis asked the men, trying to get off the subject.

  Youngblood said, "Few years ago I crewed on a freighter out of Jamaica, big industry boat. We runs through a squall an hour out, slowin' us down, and we cuts to the west a few points to keep away from Jacob's Teeth. We travelin' at night, and ever'thin' dark as hell and that wind blow bitter through our riggin'. Oh, that wind be bitter, mon, cut you to the bone. And the helmsman lose the way, him lost after thirty damn years at sea and a storm buildin' at our asses! Wireless go out, nothin' but crackle, then even the goddamn crackle gone. We goes on and on, zigzaggin' for marks, seein' nothing, no lights nor land, and all of a sudden we comes out in a place where the wind and the sea go flat. And by God there come up a moanin', hard to hear at first but then louder and nearer, things bein' said in different tongues, and wild screamin' and laughin' and carryin' on. . . "

  "Shit!" Curtis said fiercely.

  ". . . and then we sees we not alone. On all sides goddamn boats. Steamers, freighters, sloops with full riggin' catchin' a breeze that wasn't there. All of 'em green and glowin', like St. Elmo's fire cracklin' up their lines and along them timbers. Oh, mon, I tells you I ain't never seen a thing like that before, and I ain't seen it since. Them boats criss-crossin' in front of us, then passin' alongside. And we sees men in the lines and workin' the goddamn decks! They was just outlines of men, y'know, with hardly any faces, but you knew they was men. . . or they was men mebbe a long time ago. You see, we had come out in that place where the dead world and the livin' one meet. Me, I hid my face and started to shake like mad. And them ghost crews all callin' for help, y'know, because they stuck on that place forever, right there on the rim between the two worlds. Mebbe they not ready to pass on, or they tryin' to find the way back to harbor, but all the time their boats layin' down deep and just the specters ridin' the caps. God knows, that place be Hell itself, all the shriekin' and moanin' so pitiful. The helmsman spin us about and we tracks into the storm. In a while he sight the buoys at the tip of the shoals, and we goes back the way we come, and by God no man ever kissed ground so happy like we did in Kingston. "

  The men were silent for a few moments, pretending to be absorbed by their cards. Curtis reached over for his bottle, swigged, and then peered into Youngblood's haunted eyes. "I doan believe a word o' that shit! I never seen nothin' like that!"

  "Best pray you don't, mon," Davis said quietly. "Three cards. "

  A hefty black woman in a red dress passed by their table, glancing down to see if anything was needed. She cast her eyes around the bar, from the tables illuminated by harsh ceiling lights to those in the shadows at the rear. Damn Frankie King was getting drunker, louder and louder, and soon she was going to have to have Moe throw the bastard out. Two men had cornered a bar girl named Rennie, trying to work up something for later, but the girl looked bored and disinterested. Serves 'em right, the horny fuckers, she thought, with a grim smile. And then that other table back there, the two men sitting together, talking quietly.

  She had seen many things in this world, but nothing like the expressions on the faces of Steven Kip and the white man when they'd come in and taken that back table. She had served them drinks - beer for the constable, dark rum for the white man - and wanted to talk but they seemed to have no use for her. There was something in Kip's eyes that made her go about her business, cleaning glasses behind the bar, watching for inevitable trouble. Now she approached them, moving her bulk through a group of drinkers, and looked down at their table. "Get you men something else?" she asked.

  "No," Kip said, without once glancing up, and the white man shook his head.

  She paused a few more seconds, then shrugged her shoulders and turned. Frankie King was roaring drunk; he had a fighting look in his eyes.

  Kip watched her walk away and then coughed into his cupped hands; the cough tore at the linings of his lungs. He gazed into the sputum in his hands and wiped it off on a napkin. "Hallucinations," he said quietly. "There were all manner of damned gases inside the thing. "

  "No. I'm not going to pass it off so easily. " Moore looked intently into the constable's eyes. "How could we see the same thing? Even if we were affected by some kind of fumes, how the hell would we see the same thing?"

  Kip paused, taking a sip from his Red Stripe. When he put the bottle down he asked, "And just what was it we saw, David? Shadows, a boatful of debris. . . "

  "Come on, damn it!" Moore said, his eyes blazing. "By God, I know what I saw! I'm not going crazy!"

  "I didn't say you were. "

  "I didn't mean it like that. " Moore shook his head, ran a hand over his face. "I was never superstitious; I never believed in any of the stories about jumbies and all that, but this shakes me, Kip. Something was moving inside the U-boat, and I felt. . . I felt. . . "

  "What?"

  "I felt
hatred," Moore said, "I felt the presence of hatred and evil inside there. Maybe my lungs were clogged with gases; maybe my eyes were failing me and I was half-mad with fear, but those things hated us, Kip. And they wanted to rip us to pieces. "

  "I didn't see anything but old corpses inside the boat," Kip said brusquely. "If you think there was anything else, you're mistaken. Nothing but shadows, tricking the eyes. An echo that sounded like something banging iron. No telling what the gases did to our senses - amplified noises and made shadows into, well, into whatever you think you saw. "

  "Then where the hell is your lantern?" Moore asked him pointedly.

  "I couldn't see where I was going; the damned walls were closing in on me, and I suppose I dropped it. "

  "You suppose?" Moore asked incredulously, a wave of anger and emotions rising within him. "YOU SUPPOSE?"

  "Keep your voice down!" Kip cautioned.

  "Goddamn it, don't play me for a fool! I was standing beside you! I couldn't say for certain what it was, but. . . "

  Kip suddenly reached over and grasped his friend's sleeve, his gaze hardening. "Okay," he said in a low, controlled voice. "Now you listen to me. These people are a superstitious, fearful breed, David. Tell them a story like this, let it leak out so the island gossips get it, and they'll be carrying damned guns in the streets and locking themselves behind their doors. "

  "Maybe they should," Moore insisted, unwilling to give any ground. "There's something terrible about what's inside it, Kip. You know that as well as I do. "

  Kip looked at him uneasily for a moment. He lay some money beside his empty bottle and stood up. "I'm going home and get some sleep. I hope you'll do the same. " He paused, then clapped the white man's shoulder gently. "There's been too much trouble over the boat. On Monday morning I'm going to have it towed out to deep water and have the hull cut open. You've got your Nazi trinket, and I've got a murder to solve. I think that's enough. "

  "I hope to God you can get rid of it that easily," Moore said in a hollow tone.

  Kip turned away and vanished in the crowd as he moved toward the doorway, leaving Moore sitting alone.

  As the constable wound his way through the clustered tables he passed the group of poker players, and one of them was leaning over, talking eagerly, eyes widened and voice lowered. Kip strained to hear, seeing the taut expressions on the faces of the others. ". . . it that goddamn boat bringin' badness here," the man was saying. "Me, I afraid to even go down there and see it. I doan want nothin' to. . . " He looked up suddenly into Kip's face, as did the other men. Kip paused, gazing around the table.

  The man who'd been speaking glanced across to the dealer. "Two fuckin' cards," he said.

  Kip made his way out of the whirling circles of smoke and noise into the coolness of night. And as he walked along the street to his jeep he caught the fetid odor of rot, a stench hanging in the air, blown across the island in the grip of the evening's breeze. He knew what it was: the decay from the thing in the shelter oozing through the cracks and holes like a disease to infect all of Coquina.

  He reached the jeep, slid behind the wheel, and paused before starting the engine. He could lie to David Moore; he could lie to all of them, perhaps, as part of his responsibility as peacekeeper of Coquina. But he could never lie to himself. There was something terrible, something unspeakable in its evil, down in the guts of that U-boat.

  The wafting coils of rot came down around him, tightening at his throat. He started the engine, put it in gear, and drove through the darkness toward home.