by Alys Clare
‘What is that?’ Captain Zeke said. I sensed he had intended to speak loudly, in defiance, perhaps, of the awful conditions, but it was as if the intelligent darkness all around us drew in the words even as he breathed them out. I felt a shiver of sheer dread.
‘It smells like shit,’ I replied, my own words sucked away just as his had been.
‘Not down here.’
‘I’m not saying it is, just that it smells like it,’ I protested in a harsh whisper. ‘A lot of things smell like shit.’
He had bent down to the loosely stacked woodpile, and now was poking at it. I wished he would stop. ‘There can’t be anything under all that,’ I began, even as he gave it a sudden shove.
The stack collapsed, pieces of raw timber and worked wood of various sizes and weights rolling towards us and several crashing into us. Both of us leapt back, and Captain Zeke muttered a sharp curse.
‘Are you injured?’ I demanded.
‘Nothing serious,’ he replied, briskly rubbing his shin.
The smell was appalling now.
Holding out our lanterns, we illuminated a low, roughly circular opening in the bulkhead against which the wood had been stacked.
Our free hands over our noses and mouths, we lay down and edged through it on elbows and knees, Captain Zeke going ahead.
I was bent double and still restricted by the sides of the opening as he emerged into whatever lay beyond. His gasp of utter disgust made me straighten up instinctively and very unwisely, so that I cracked my head violently on a beam right above me. Bright lights flashed across my vision and I felt a wave of nausea. The stench was making me retch and, fleetingly, there was another smell as well, and it had elements that I knew I ought to recognize. But then, dizzy and reeling, I fell, both knees crashing on the sloping wooden boards with an echoing crump like cannon fire.
I felt his hands on me as he dragged me out into the hellish space beyond. The smell was far, far worse now and I wished he’d pushed me back the other way.
I managed to stand up. Shaking from the sharp pain inside my skull, I followed the line of Captain Zeke’s pointing arm as he held his lantern over what he had just spotted.
It was a large, squat barrel, perhaps half a man’s height and roughly two to two and a half foot in breadth. It stood in the corner, leaning against the bulkhead through which we’d just crawled, roped firmly in place even though the sloping floor worked in its favour, forcing it back against the wooden wall. I puzzled for a moment over how it had come to be in that tiny space with its low, narrow access – I’d just had a blow to the head and wasn’t at my sharpest – and then I realized: it had gone in the same way Captain Zeke and I had, on its side.
We stared at it, our hands firmly over our faces. The lid sat askew so that the contents were visible, glittering as they caught the light from our lanterns.
And I thought that one thing was sure: it wasn’t going to be taken out the same way it went in.
For it was full almost to the top with bodily waste. Unless the lid could be sealed in some way that would be totally leakproof, it wasn’t going anywhere until it had been emptied.
I spared several moments’ compassionate sympathy for whatever poor sod got landed with that job.
I said, ‘Captain, I believe your ghosts are now explained. You’ve had illicit passengers down here.’ I kicked my foot around the detritus on the floor: meat bones, a rock-hard heel of bread, a little pile of rotten vegetables.
He didn’t reply.
I thought perhaps he was embarrassed. He had all but sworn his ship was haunted; he had been utterly confident that he would prove it to me. Instead we had just found evidence of a far more rational explanation, pretty much as I’d known we would.
But then he turned to face me, and I saw his expression.
His eyes were wide, the whites showing all around the pupils. His mouth was open as if he was halfway through a huge yawn. He was shaking, and beads of sweat stood out on his deathly pale flesh.
‘Listen!’ he hissed.
But I could hear nothing except the slap of water from somewhere close by. ‘I can’t hear—’ I began.
Then something hit me. I flinched, my upflung protective arm expecting to encounter bone and sinew, but there was nothing there.
Nothing there.
But I’d felt it, heard it …
There was evil in that dark and horrible space, humming like a hive of furious hornets in a chimney, the sound rising in pitch until it beat against my head and I cast down my lantern, crying aloud and stuffing my fingers in my agonized ears. I screwed my eyes shut.
And then I saw it.
A dark countenance, with wild, white-rimmed eyes of darkest brown, the black pupils merging with the brown irises so that it was like staring into a bottomless well. The black hair was tight-curled, and the curls writhed and wriggled like maggots. The brow was pronounced, overhanging those terrible eyes like a cliff, and the beautifully sculptured nose flared into wide, distended nostrils above the full-lipped mouth. I wanted to look away but I could not; I wanted to close my eyes but they were already closed.
And as I watched something happened to the nose … It began to extend, to flow towards me, and as it did so it changed shape, the wide tip narrowing and elongating as if it was made of clay beneath the hands of a sculptor. On, on it came, and I knew its intent was full of evil and malice. It was not a nose now, it was a snout, and the flesh was covered in warty lumps … I’d seen a snout like that, I knew what it was, and I heard myself moan in terror.
The snout was huge now, right up against my face, and the creature began to open its mouth, slowly, slowly at first, then with a great snapping crack.
And the crocodile’s jaws gaped at me as its deadly rows of sharp, inward-leaning teeth began to close.
I was on the floor, my head in the filth. I gave a great yell and began to struggle up, trying to stare in every direction at once, but Captain Zeke’s strong hands were on my shoulders holding me down, and his warm human presence was all around me. ‘You’re all right,’ he panted, ‘it’s stopped.’
I rounded on him. ‘You saw it? That–that thing that came out of the face?’
I knew from his expression he hadn’t. ‘I saw nothing, Gabe. But I heard it, that wailing.’
I had heard no wailing.
I got to my knees, leaning heavily on my hands. ‘We must get away from this place,’ I muttered.
‘We will, but first we must search it.’
There was no gainsaying him.
With reluctance so profound that it almost paralysed me, I staggered to my feet.
The space we were in was tiny – perhaps three paces by two – and the deck above bore down hard just above our heads while the deck beneath our feet sloped upwards. Captain Zeke could just about stand upright, but he was considerably shorter than me. I was fighting a growing sense of claustrophobia, having to tell myself very forcefully that the ceiling was not steadily coming closer.
Captain Zeke was moving slowly around the perimeter in one direction, and I did the same in the other. Each of us held up our lantern, feeling with the free hand all around the oak walls, across the boards of the floor, around each beam and rib. We were perhaps a pace apart, about to meet and complete our inspection, when I heard him draw in a sharp breath.
‘Gabe,’ he said in a hoarse whisper.
I went to stand beside him, adding my light to his.
The body was tiny. Trying to gauge its height, I reckoned about four foot, perhaps less. It was skinny, almost skeletal, the flesh desiccated and yellowish. I thought in the first horrified moment that it was that of a child.
But then, leaning in closer and holding my lantern right beside the face, I saw the yawning mouth. There were gaps where teeth had been lost, and those that remained were worn down with long use. Whoever this man was, he had died in advanced old age.
The body had been pinned to the rib by means of an iron spike through the neck.
&nbs
p; Captain Zeke cleared his throat and said very quietly, ‘Is that how he was killed?’
‘No,’ I said instantly. ‘The spike was driven into the wood quite recently.’ I pointed to where a splinter of oak had been split away as the spike went in. ‘That looks fresh.’
Captain Zeke nodded. ‘That’s something,’ he muttered.
In any case, I reflected, life had left this man a long, long time ago.
The body was clad in some sort of flowing robe that clung to its bony protuberances. The fabric was pale and perhaps had once been white, and it was torn and, in places, little more than tatters of cloth. There was the remains of a headdress – a turban of some sort – that seemed to consist of a long strip of the same cloth, intricately wound. Delicately raising an edge, I could make out sparse tufts of tightly curled hair, black streaked with grey. I ran my hand down over the shoulder and chest, the concave belly and the hips …
The pelvic girdle stood out stark, interrupting the fall of the ragged garment. With an exclamation, I pushed the cloth aside and held the light right up to where the legs bifurcated from the pubis.
‘It’s a woman,’ I said.
Captain Zeke and I stacked the biggest pieces of wood back in place, much as they’d been when we made our discovery, and made our way as swiftly as we could back through the dark spaces of the lowest deck and up towards the light. Emerging on the open deck, both of us stopped and simply stood there in the daylight, breathing in the clean air. Never had it smelled so sweet.
A handful of the men had quietly come to stand around us. One of them said, ‘Well?’
I waited for Captain Zeke to speak. He didn’t. He glanced at me, and I thought he gave a faint nod as if to say, carry on.
‘Not ghosts, lads,’ I said with all the certainty I could muster, telling myself firmly that the ghastly vision I’d seen was no more than the aftermath of the blow to my head. ‘There has indeed been a presence down there on the lowest deck’ – there was a muffled exclamation and I saw at least two sailors cross themselves – ‘but it was a human presence: unbeknownst to you, you’ve had men secretly living aboard.’
Somebody began a protest: ‘But the blue men! I saw them, and you can’t tell me—’ But someone else quickly stopped it with a curse and what sounded like a surreptitious blow.
‘There’s evidence that people were down there,’ I went on, raising my voice in case anyone else felt like interrupting, ‘and it’s clear that they’ve been helping themselves to food and water, and that they used a barrel for their waste. Ghosts don’t eat and drink, lads, and they don’t piss and shit either.’
Now the muttering came from more than one part of the group of men who encircled us. Before speculation could grow, Captain Zeke spoke.
‘Enough,’ he growled. He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to, for his crew fell silent and attentive at that one word. ‘Doctor Taverner is right,’ he said. ‘Whatever has been on board with us was made of flesh and blood. They’ve gone now, whoever they were.’
There was a stunned silence. Then a tall man with a sleeve of tattoos and a scar on his chin said, ‘How did they get off without us seeing them?’
Captain Zeke shrugged. ‘The more important question, Willum, is how did they get on board? And where?’
A spate of chatter broke out – excited, nervous, alarmed – and it occurred to me that it was only the present, extraordinary circumstances that had made the men forget their discipline and start talking among themselves when their captain had just told them not to. Looking round at the faces, I realized that my matter-of-fact explanation, my insistence that the Falco was not haunted but had given a bunch of men a free passage across the Atlantic, hadn’t really convinced them at all.
I felt a sudden wave of vertigo, and for a moment thought I was going to be sick. Risking a swift look out across the water, I saw that it was still calm. Not the old trouble, then, I told myself firmly. I’d just had a blow to the head – putting up my hand, my exploring fingers felt a lump like an egg on the back of my skull – and no doubt that was the cause of my symptoms.
But, whatever the reason, I had to go. If I stayed I risked throwing up in front of Captain Zeke’s crew, and that might make them think I might not believe my solid, rational explanation any more than they did.
‘I must search out the coroner,’ I said quietly to Captain Zeke, drawing him a few paces away from the group of sailors. He nodded, turned to issue orders – he too must have realized that standing around speculating wasn’t good for discipline or morale – and then rejoined me.
‘You look awful,’ he said bluntly.
‘I feel awful.’
‘That was a hard knock you took, down there.’
‘Yes.’
‘The coroner?’ he said, turning the word into a question.
‘You and I just discovered a body. Your ship is in Plymouth harbour, which falls within the coroner’s jurisdiction. Before you tell me it’s very far from a recent death’ – for he had opened his mouth to speak – ‘I must tell you that it makes no difference.’
I could sense the anger building up in him. ‘So I must endure some skinny, dried-up, busy-bodying local damned official poking his long nose into every corner of my ship?’
‘Yes,’ I said firmly, with a private smile at how far Captain Zeke’s imaginary coroner differed from reality. ‘First thing in the morning. Don’t let anyone go near that hidden space in the meantime.’
He gave a sudden guffaw. ‘You think anyone’d go near even if I threatened the lash if they didn’t? Goodbye, Gabe. See you tomorrow.’
Then he turned and stomped back towards his cabin.
I made my stumbling way back to the inn where I’d left Hal, mounted up and headed out of the town. The thought of the long ride home was too depressing – my head was pounding now and the nausea threatened to return – so I concentrated on remembering the quickest way to Theophilus Davey’s residence, at Withybere. ‘Between the village and Warleigh Point,’ I muttered to myself, the precise form of words Theo had used when he first told me where he lived. We had become good friends since then, despite the fact that there were secrets between us; dark matters that Theo suspected and the truth of which he would never discover.
He was married to a fair and comely woman called Elaine and they had three lively children. I would be disturbing them in the evening, in what ought to have been family time, but there was no help for it. I hoped they would understand that I wasn’t going to make it all the way back to Rosewyke without a rest, and in any case it was my duty to inform Theo that there was a body on board the Falco.
I reached Theo’s house. I slid off Hal’s back and fell over. I picked myself up, made sure I had secured his reins to the ring in the wall, then tapped on the door.
It opened, spilling out light, warmth, the sound of voices – someone was singing, an adult, female voice with lighter children’s voices joining in – and the smell of food. Catching sight of me, Theo bit back the greeting and took hold of my arm, taking my weight and helping me inside.
‘My horse …’ I said. ‘I’ve left Hal outside, he’s—’
‘Peter!’ Theo yelled. A voice called back and Theo said, ‘See to the doctor’s horse.’
I relaxed a little.
‘In here.’ Theo was helping me through the open door that led to the family’s quarters, supporting me as together we climbed up the stairs, crossed a wide landing and went into the parlour. The fire was lit and he lowered me down onto a settle. Staring at me, his face full of concern, he said gruffly, ‘What in God’s name has happened to you?’
‘I was on my old ship and I hit my head.’
‘Your ship?’ He looked deeply perplexed.
I managed a smile. ‘It’s all right, Theo, I’m not going back to sea. I had a message. My former captain, Ezekiel Colt, said that—’ But I didn’t think I could manage the details, not just then. ‘He wanted me to investigate something, and in the course of so doing, we c
ame across a body in a secret space behind one of the bulkheads.’
‘One of the crew?’ Theo was watching me, his bright blue eyes narrowed in concentration.
I shook my head, which made me moan in pain. ‘No. Definitely not. It’s not a recent death, but—’
‘But it’s my business anyway,’ he finished for me.
‘I told the captain we’d be back there first thing in the morning,’ I said, leaning my head against the settle’s hard wooden back and closing my eyes. ‘The spot where we found it has been secured and Captain Colt will make sure nobody tampers with it.’
‘Good,’ Theo said.
I opened my eyes and sat up straight. ‘Now, if I could trouble you for a drink, and perhaps a piece of bread’ – I wasn’t hungry, but I knew I wouldn’t get home unless I ate something – ‘I’ll be on my way.’
‘Don’t be an arse, Gabe,’ Theo said. ‘You are not fit to ride further tonight. I shall fetch Elaine, and she will tend to your injury, and then there will be good food and a warm bed for you.’
‘But Celia—’
‘We shall send word to your delightful sister that you had to call here late on a matter of some urgency – which is no more than the truth – and that we prevailed upon you to dine with us and stay the night.’ He grinned. ‘I won’t mention the smack on the head unless you do.’
It was probably a measure of how hard I’d hit myself that I gave in so readily. Theo brought paper, quill and ink, and I wrote out a brief note. Theo summoned one of the stable lads and he rode off to deliver it. I think I might have slipped into a brief sleep round about then, and when I woke up, Elaine was beside me. She was pressing something very cold to the lump on my head, and her touch was as gentle as down.
