The Night Boat

by Robert McCammon

Chapter Eleven

 

  WHEN HE WAS a young boy running free and wild on the waterfront streets of St. Thomas, Cockrell Goodloe had seen a woman stabbed to death.

  It had been very fast, a blur of motion and color as a man in a red shirt darted from an alley, catching a lithe young black woman in a brown-striped dress around the throat. She had dropped a sack of groceries at her feet, and Goodloe had seen the sharp glitter of a blade as the knife drove down into her midsection once, then again. "You bad!" the man had shouted mindlessly. "You dirty bad!" The young woman had opened her mouth to scream. At first nothing came out but a terrible choking sound, and then the shriek came, a sound that raised the flesh all over him, that caught at his throat and made him clap his hands over his ears. The man had cast her aside, dropping the knife, and had turned to run. A few older men shouted and chased after him; on the blood-pooled earth the woman shrieked, on and on, a cry of desperation and horror. And then she was silent, and that was when someone bent down beside her.

  And now, forty years later, in the middle of a dreamless sleep, he heard that shriek again.

  At once he had pulled himself out of bed, his nerves tingling and heart pounding as they had done that day a long time ago. He was still groggy from sleep, and he stood in the center of his room, bare feet on harsh timbers, groping for the lantern at the bedside.

  "What that?" his wife asked, rising up in bed, a shadow in the darkness. "What that sound?"

  "Jus' wait now," he said. Matches. Where them goddamn matches? He found them, lit the lantern wick. The flame grew, warming the sparsely furnished room. He put on a threadbare shirt over his shorts and, taking the lantern, he crossed the floor to the single open window. He drew aside a tattered curtain and peered out into the night. His wife came up beside him and clutched at his shoulder.

  There was another loud, pained shriek. Sounded like a woman, stabbed and screaming. But no, that couldn't be it. Goodloe's farm was two miles to the north of Coquina village, and the next nearest place was another mile on. The shriek continued for a few more seconds, ending in a high, wild grunt. Then came the rooting of the hogs in their pen behind the storage shed.

  "Somethin' at the hogs!" Goodloe said. He turned from the window, moving quickly past his wife, through a tiny kitchen to the back door. "Don't you go out there!" the woman cried out in a frantic burst of words. "Don't you go. . . !" But he was already through the door, grasping a hoe he had propped against a wall. He followed the lantern's track toward the hog pen. Now more of the hogs were squealing, that terrible, almost-human sound of fear and pain, and Goodloe's skin crawled.

  "Don't go!" his wife called out, running after him, her gown flying.

  He hefted the hoe like a weapon as he neared the storage shed; it had been torn open, and one door sagged off its hinges. What the hell? he wondered, his mind racing. And then he had rounded the shed and stood near the fenced-in pen where he kept his livestock.

  The reddish-brown beasts, fattened for Saturday market, churned madly within the pen, jostling each other in a frenzy, rooting frantically and emitting squeals of terror. Goodloe couldn't see for the dust they were kicking up, and he lifted his lantern over his head.

  In the dim shafts of light that pierced the haze of dust he saw that two of the largest hogs were down. Black blood glistened around their bulks, and he could see the gleam of bone through their wounds. The other hogs were startled at the light; their eyes were wild and red, and they jammed into each other to get away from the reek of death. But there was another noise, a sound above the squeals.

  It was the sound of flesh being ripped by the handfuls.

  And another noise, an unrestrained sucking, made Goodloe back away a few paces from the pen. He bumped into his wife, who grasped at him and trembled, her eyes widening because she had seen.

  There were other figures in the pen, forms that huddled around the hogs' carcasses and feverishly tore the flesh, then bent over to suck from the flowing rivers of liquid. The beams reflected off the backs of the hogs, piercing the shadows and briefly illuminating things that appeared human and inhuman at the same time. When the light grazed them they looked up into the beams, and Goodloe caught his breath in terror. There were three of them, huddled over the flesh and pools of blood, and the light catching in their eyes burned like the raging centers of hell.

  "Oh God Jesus," Goodloe whispered hoarsely.

  And then the things drew themselves away from the light, throwing up skeletal arms before their faces. Beside him the woman screamed, and then the forms got to their feet, half-hidden by the dust. Goodloe dropped his lantern down and when he did the things melted into the darkness, moving like aged men plagued by some terrible bone-rotting disease.

  Goodloe and his wife stood where they were for a few moments more, the woman crying and the man murmuring "Be quiet. Be quiet," over and over again. In the distance they heard the brittle noise of the things crashing through jungle growth, and it wasn't until long after that noise had faded that the man moved unsteadily toward the animals.

  "Get back to the house," he told his wife. She shook her head, and he yelled, "GO ON!"

  She stepped away, looking fearfully beyond him toward the veil of the jungle, and then ran back to the farmhouse.

  Goodloe moved around to the opposite side of the pen to the place where the fence had been torn open. Stepping over shattered timbers, he knelt over the carcasses and examined the wounds. The throats had been ripped wide open, veins torn and bone gnawed. Large pieces of flesh and hair lay scattered at his feet. The other hogs, still unsettled and fearful, stayed crowded together in a far corner, seemingly mesmerized by the lantern. Goodloe stood up, stepped through cooling puddles and gazed off into the underbrush. The things had attacked and killed like animals, but in the dim light they had appeared to be men. They'd looked old and. . . yes. . . diseased. Sort of like lepers: pieces of their faces missing, a two-fingered hand thrust out, a head covered with what looked like yellowish sores. He trembled, staring off into the darkness.

  And when he left the pen he began walking quickly for his house, knowing that whatever they had been. . . men, animals, or some nightmarish breed of both. . . they might be back, and there was a rifle under the bed he had to load.