The Collected Short Fiction, page 36
It took him a few minutes before he understood what the present they’d left him was. When he understood, he had to lean his hand against the wall while a tide of vertigo swept through him.
It just needed a place to be born. That’s all it ever was.
When the vertigo passed, he knelt beside the bed, placing his hand gingerly on Eric’s shoulder.
“Can you feel it inside you?” he asked. “Moving around?”
A change came over Eric’s face: it went still and pale, as though something essential to the function of life had been wrested from him, or had simply run down. He blinked, said nothing.
“You can, can’t you.” Will brushed the hair back from Eric’s forehead. An intimate gesture. A kindness. Eric tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. “Is it going to come out through your face? Or do I have to make a hole for it?”
“Go away.”
“People think you’re such a nice guy,” Will said, petting Eric’s hair softly. “They don’t see you the way I do. They don’t see the way your eyes go flat when you’re drunk. You’re ugly in your heart. I can see it.” He stared at him there, wasting away in his own bed, crawling with flies and marinating in his own stink. He’d always been ugly inside, and now, finally, anybody could see it. He wanted to drag him through the street, or down to the bar, and hang him from a hook on the wall. He wanted to make it plain to everybody. “Do you have to be dead first? Or will it break you open while you’re still alive?”
Eric sobbed. Tears spilled from the corners of his eyes and ran into his hair, his ears. He reached out and clutched Will’s hand. He brought it close to his face, almost kissing it. “Please kill me,” he said. “Please. I don’t want it to come. I don’t want to be alive when it happens. I’m scared.”
“I wonder what would happen if I called it.”
Eric’s whimpering stalled. He fixed Will with a look of naked terror.
Will went back into the kitchen and did a little search for a bottle of something, anything to smooth the edges of the experience. He found a third of a bottle of some basement brand rum in the back of one of the cabinets, and walked calmly back into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed by Eric’s side and dialed up Garrett’s number on his phone.
When the grotesque language began to spill into his ear, he put the phone on speaker, and set it on the mattress. Eric mewled like an animal, curling into himself. Will felt the old, empty ache bestir itself again, and he welcomed it as one would welcome an old friend. They listened, and he drank, for some time. The heat crowded the air out of the room. At some point, when the light sliding through the blinds had taken on a golden color, he ran out of what was in the bottle. It fell to the floor, where it rolled under the bed. Shortly afterwards Eric began to give birth.
His body went rigid on the bed, a thin keening sound slipped through his teeth. Will leaned in close, watching the rupture in his face. It was a blood-rimmed crater into dark precincts. Eric’s thin wail interlaced with the cracked slurry of words leaking from the phone, combining to produce a beautiful threnody, a glittering lament that landed in him like hooks.
Thick bone cracked with a shocking sound, and blood spat from Eric’s face, splashing in a sudden thick river over his cheek.
Something struggled into the light.
Will felt the presence of it before he could see it. He felt an answer to the long ache. He leaned over Eric’s shuddering body, brought his face close. He opened his mouth over the wound, touched his lips to its ragged edges. Fix me, he thought. Please. Make me whole. He closed his eyes, felt the billowing heat of it. Something moved against his tongue and he sobbed with a terrified gratitude as it probed the roof of his mouth, his teeth and his cheeks. Filling his mouth. He opened wider and gulped it all in, blood leaking from the seal of his lips. Eric began to shriek, repeatedly and in escalating volume, and a host of startled cockroaches scrambled from their lairs, climbing up the walls and rising into the air with their dark, humming wings, a swarm of Christ-bound spirits.
The Cannibal Priests of New England
First published online, 2015-2016
1: Tortuga, 1662
Palm trees heaved in the night wind. Between them he made out a heavy layer of stars, like a crust of salt on heaven’s hull. A briny stink filled the air, reminding him of how very far from home he was. The sea was calm tonight and the waves made a steady hush against the shore.
Behind him the small port town gabbled excitedly to itself: fiddles and croaking voices lifted in song like a chorus of crows, voices raised in anger or friendship, the calling and the crying of girls and women. It sounded like life, he supposed. No wonder it made him ill.
A shape lurched toward him from town: a man, fat and stumbling, a rag-wrapped something in his left hand. He navigated the sand with difficulty. The smell of rum blew from him like a wind.
“Martin,” Fat Gully said. His voice was thick. “What’re you.”
“Are you attempting to speak?” said Martin. “I’m taking some air. Please go away.”
“Nonono,” Gully said, his words sliding together and colliding. “No you don’t. No you fucking don’t.”
Martin controlled his voice. “No I don’t what.”
Fat Gully crashed down onto his butt, his fall cushioned by the sand. The thing in his hand looked bloody. “No you don’t take on no high-born airs with me, you fancy bastard. I’ll peel you standing, fat purse or fucking not.”
Martin wore his rapier, but he had seen Gully and his wicked little knife in action and was not eager to test him, even in his diminished state. Instead he turned his gaze to the gory rag in Gully’s hand, which had begun to leak a thin black drizzle onto the sand. “What in God’s name do you have there?”
Gully smiled and climbed slowly to his feet. The lights of the town behind him cast him in shadow as he extended his arm and opened his hand; he looked like a thing crawled from hell.
Martin inclined his head forward to see, raising an eyebrow. It took him a moment to make sense of it.
“I know what you’re about,” Gully said, a dull smile moving across his face. “I want a seat at the table.”
“I don’t know what you mean by showing that to me, but I assure you I have no use for it. Get rid of it.”
“You’ll learn not to bark orders at me, Mister Dunwood,” Gully said, rewrapping his dreadful trophy and securing it in some mysterious inner sanctum of his jacket. He did not seem in the least disappointed by Martin’s dismissal. If anything it, he appeared cheered by it. “Oh yes you will. We’ll see what it means once we get there, won’t we?”
For the first time in a long week Martin felt something inside him lighten. “‘Once we get there.’ Have you found us passage then, Mr. Gully?”
“I have indeed,” said Gully, smiling again. He turned about and made his tentative way back to town. A pistol cracked in some ill-lit alley and a cry of pain rose above the cacophony of voices like a flushed bird. Gully lurched in its direction, his purpose steady. “Come and meet our new benefactors, Mr. Dunwood. We ship with the tide.”
2: The Captain
Fat Gully slid into the city like an eel into a coral reef, steering his round body through the nooks and crannies of the crowd with an adroitness that Martin both hated and admired. It was just another reminder that he could not allow himself to be fooled by this squat little man, by his ungainly frame. He was a quick, murderous little villain.
The port was alive with its usual pitched debauchery. It was a ghastly place. Martin did not know its name and doubted something so wretched had ever troubled to acquire one. It was a confusion of noise and stinks: roaring and howling, gunpowder and piss. Taverns spilled with light. Women were passed about like drinking mugs from one lecherous grotesque to another — some seemed to enjoy it as much as the men, though perhaps that was only a side effect of hard drink; others wore the flat, affectless expressions he had seen on his first visit to a Farm, hidden away in the slums of St. Giles, back in London. Black faces abounded here; he’d heard that some were even free, though he found that hard to credit. A black man was as alien to Martin’s experience as a crocodile or a camel, and he found himself staring even as Gully hustled him along.
A dim glow marked the docks: fires and lanterns alight on shore, ship windows radiant as business was conducted within. The masts were like pikes struck into the earth — they gave an odd appearance of order beside the lurching little town.
Gully shouldered aside a man nearly double his size as he crossed the muddy street, and made his way for a two story wooden structure alongside the docks. It was clearly an inn, and a busy one at that, but there was little noise coming from inside. Martin looked for a name but, like the town itself, it seemed to have remained unchristened.
“Mind your manners, now,” Gully said. He pushed his way into the building, and Martin followed.
The room was close and hot. Several small round tables made up a kind of dining area; an arched doorway led into a kitchen where dim forms toiled. A fire grumbled to itself in the vast, grimy hearth. The flue was insufficient to its task, and black, oily smoke trickled up the wall and gathered like an ill portent on the ceiling.
Mr. Gully approached a table of three men, centrally located in the dining area. His demeanor was much reduced, and when he spoke, it was with none of his usual bluster.
“I brung him, Captain Beverly,” he said. “Like what I said.”
Martin knew the men immediately for what they were: pirates. They were not likely to be anything else, here in Tortuga, but the shabbiness of their bearing would have made it plain besides. The man on the right was older, his gray beard hacked short and his face a jigsaw puzzle of scars. One eye sat dully in its socket like a boiled quail’s egg, dull and yellowed. The man on the left was slender, almost boyish, his skin the soft brown of rain-darkened wood. Between them was Captain Beverly: incongruously handsome, though long unwashed, with shaggy blonde hair and a beard that had last seen a razor when King Charles himself had been a boy, or so Martin figured. All of them wore loose-fitting clothing and all of them were armed with steel. The younger man also held a blunderbuss between his knees, which his fingers tapped across with nervous energy.
“Oh my my, look at the pretty little thing,” the captain said, and the older man offered a chuckle.
Martin stood ramrod straight, determined to suffer whatever insults to his person were coming. He needed this passage. “Mr. Gully will have told you I have money,” he said.
“You’d better, Pretty. I wouldn’t want to think you’re wasting my time.”
When Martin just stood there, the captain spoke to Gully without troubling to look at him. “Ask the gentleman to produce the coin, Mr. Gully.”
Martin ignored Gully, whose face was a shadowy moon in the firelight, and withdrew his purse. He placed it onto the table, suddenly sure that one of them would cleave his fingers from his hand for the sport of it. When they did not, he removed his hand and let it rest steadily at his side.
The older man spilled the coins onto the table and counted them. The captain did not look at them at all. He kept his gaze fixed on Martin; he seemed happy, almost jovial. When his compatriot informed him that the money was sufficient, he waved a hand as though he was beyond such trifles.
“Mr. Gully tells me you’re bound for Nantucket,” he said.
“I am.”
“But I don’t want to go to Nantucket.”
“I don’t expect that you do. As far North as you are inclined to go should be quite sufficient, if you please.”
“Where do you come from, Pretty? From far away, I think.”
“I was born in Bristol. I sailed from London.”
“To what end, I wonder. Hm? A gentleman from the King’s good country, here in the savage clime, squandering his wealth.”
Martin wondered the same thing of the captain. He was an educated man; not at all what he’d been expecting.
“That is my own business, Captain. With respect.”
He sensed Gully stiffen beside him, but none of the seated men seemed to think anything of this minor rebuke.
“So it is, then, Pretty. See that your business does not interfere with mine, and perhaps we shall part as friends. Mr. Johns here will see you to your berth. My ship is The Lady Celeste and she is docked outside. Dishonor her and I’ll bury you at sea. Are we in agreement?”
Martin swallowed his pride. To be spoken to like that by a man of such low station — a thug who should be lapping water from the puddles in Newgate Prison — caused a pain that was nearly physical.
But Alice awaited him on the far side of this journey, and he could not afford the comforts of his station. Not now. But he would remember this wretch and he would see him suffer for this display, that he vowed.
“Yes, Captain. We are in agreement.”
Captain Beverly clasped his hand and gave it a vigorous shake. “Do let’s be friends, Pretty. Now follow Mr. Johns and perhaps I’ll join you later for a drink, and we shall tell wonderful stories of our youth, hm? Won’t that be lovely?”
The older, one-eyed man permitted himself another chuckle.
“Now forgive me, I’ve murder to do. I shall see you presently.”
He departed, the young dark-skinned man in tow. Mr. Johns, the old man with the dead eye, made no move to rise from his chair. “Sit yer arses down,” he said. “I mean to to be well drunk before I get back aboard that devil’s ship.”
Martin and Gully had no choice but to comply.
3: The Cargo
The sailors called him Thomas the Bloody, because it made them laugh. Thomas Thickett was a small, slender man: stooped, balding, and constantly ill. He had a penchant for nosebleeds — they came without warning, and always with a gruesome vigor — and so he received his name. He was born thirty-seven years ago in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but fled to the islands after escaping one of the Farms in Boston. He kept a gun beneath his bed, and he slept poorly.
He had come into possession of a small, ramshackle warehouse, situated far from the docks, in a game of cards three years ago. He stored unmarked cargo for indefinite periods without asking any questions, and he provided sails and timber to the quartermasters who came to him when it was time to refit their vessels. As long as he did these things he was assured a livelihood here.
Even so, he knew that the time to leave was almost upon him.
Rumors and whispers grew like mold in this dank little town, and he was beginning to hear words that scared him. Words like cattle hunters. Prospectors. Carrion angels. Cannibal priests.
He was alone in the warehouse. It was densely packed with mildewed crates, rolled canvas, bags of grain. A single lantern, balanced precariously on a wooden barrel full of God only knew what, cast a shallow little nimbus of orange light, and threw strange, wide-shouldered shadows against the wall. A cool wind blew in from the bay, carrying the sharp tang of ozone, the promise of rain and thunder.
He wished it would start soon. In the quiet he could hear the hoarse whispers, a dozen or more voices attempting speech in the strange tongue of the dead. The voices crawled over the walls like cockroaches.
He heard a pair of boots trod over the wooden floor outside his office and he sat quietly as the door was pulled open. Captain Beverly shouldered into the small room, his first mate close behind him. The captain’s eyes danced quickly around the contents of the room before settling on him at last.
“Thomas the Bloody,” he said. “Bless my bones.”
Thomas nodded at him. “It’s been some time, Captain. It’s a fine thing to see you again.”
“You’ve met my first mate, Mr. Thierry?”
“I have, sir. Yes. I have the cargo right here, sir.”
Captain Beverly and Mr. Thierry exchanged a glance. “Right to business then, is it? All right, Tom, all right. Show it to me then.”
Thomas the Bloody guided the two men out to the main floor of his warehouse. There was a large door here which would swing open to admit carriages drawn by mules or oxen, but it was secured fast, shutting out the din of the town. He carried the lantern in one hand to light their path. The whispering voices were louder in here; he felt steeped in ghosts.
The voices came from the crate, about waist high, which sat in the middle of the room like a diminished little temple.
“I have a carriage secured. It’ll be waiting outside,” said Thomas. “On my expense, of course.”
“Of course, Tom. Always reliable.” Captain Beverly nodded at the crate. “Open it.”
” … Captain?”
“I want to be sure.”
Thomas fetched a crowbar from a shelf and set to, his body sheened in an icy sweat. Nails squealed against wood and the top of the crate popped off. Thomas the Bloody stared inside despite himself. He felt the pirates come up on either side of him.
The crate was filled with severed heads. Their mouths moved thickly and slowly, pushing sound through their mouths in thin, reedy little wisps. Eyes rolled in their sockets. Tongues moved like grubs in earth. The heads were blackened with decay but they appeared to be European. The language they attempted was like nothing any of them had ever heard.
Captain Beverly clapped him on the shoulder. “Seal it, Tom.” His demeanor was much reduced.
Thomas gratefully complied, quickly nailing the lid back over it. The voices were barely muffled.
“There’s talk, Thomas,” the captain said to him as he worked. “The Farmers are looking for you.”
He paused in his work. He held one long nail between his fingers. He stared at the dirt caked around the fingernails, the grain of the wood beneath his hand. He said nothing. A dark coin of blood dropped from his nose onto the crate’s lid.
“Consider this a favor, old friend,” said the captain. He felt more than saw Mr. Thierry move behind him.
“No,” said Thomas the Bloody, but before he could turn the world opened in a terrible shard of light. He smelled burning hair, glimpsed a gore-streaked mess splash onto the crate in front of him, and was enfolded by the final darkness.
