Pirates & Ghosts Short Stories, page 60
When we reached London Keller disappeared in the direction of the Strand. What his experiences may have been I cannot tell, but it seems that he invaded the office of an evening paper at 11.45 a.m. (I told him English editors were most idle at that hour), and mentioned my name as that of a witness to the truth of his story.
“I was nearly fired out,” he said furiously at lunch. “As soon as I mentioned you, the old man said that I was to tell you that they didn’t want any more of your practical jokes, and that you knew the hours to call if you had anything to sell, and that they’d see you condemned before they helped to puff one of your infernal yarns in advance. Say, what record do you hold for truth in this country, anyway?”
“A beauty. You ran up against it, that’s all. Why don’t you leave the English papers alone and cable to New York? Everything goes over there.”
“Can’t you see that’s just why?” he repeated.
“I saw it a long time ago. You don’t intend to cable, then?”
“Yes, I do,” he answered, in the over-emphatic voice of one who does not know his own mind.
That afternoon I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river-steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries circling round the head of Litchfield A. Keller, journalist, of Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A., whose mission it was to make the Britishers sit up.
He stumbled gasping into the thick gloom, and the roar of the traffic came to his bewildered ears.
“Let’s go to the telegraph-office and cable,” I said. “Can’t you hear the New York World crying for news of the great sea-serpent, blind, white, and smelling of musk, stricken to death by a submarine volcano, and assisted by his loving wife to die in mid-ocean, as visualised by an American citizen, the breezy, newsy, brainy news paper man of Dayton, Ohio? ’Rah for the Buckeye State. Step lively! Both gates! Szz! Boom! Aah!” Keller was a Princeton man, and he seemed to need encouragement.
“You’ve got me on your own ground,” said he, tugging at his overcoat pocket. He pulled out his copy, with the cable forms – for he had written out his telegram – and put them all into my hand, groaning, “I pass. If I hadn’t come to your cursed country – if I’d sent it off at Southampton – if I ever get you west of the Alleghannies, if –”
“Never mind, Keller. It isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of your country. If you had been seven hundred years older you’d have done what I am going to do.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Tell it as a lie.”
“Fiction?” This with the full-blooded disgust of a journalist for the illegitimate branch of the profession.
“You can call it that if you like. I shall call it a lie.”
And a lie it has become; for Truth is a naked lady, and if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behoves a gentleman either to give her a print petticoat or to turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.
Singers
John Leahy
Inspired by H. R. Giger’s Hommage a Bocklin
When they came across Lammers he was clinging to a piece of flotsam, his head resting against the timber, his eyes closed. Vejerin called out to him but no answer came from the figure bobbing up and down in the water, its eyes remaining shut. Only when they were dragging him on board did the man show a sign of life, groaning weakly. They laid him on the deck at Clemens’ feet, Vejerin going to Clemens’ side as they did so. The Captain and his Chief Officer regarded the prone form beneath them.
“Seaman,” Clemens addressed the drenched figure.
The man moaned, moving his head a little.
“Seaman,” Clemens said again.
The man’s eyes fluttered open and regarded the Captain’s. Then their owner turned his head to the side and weakly vomited out some water.
“Take him to the galley,” Clemens ordered. “Get some sustenance into him.”
Lammers’ exhausted eyes looked directly upward into the sky, blinking as they rested on the black flag billowing from the mast high overhead. Then he was being lifted.
* * *
Clemens and Vejerin entered the galley about half an hour later to find the new arrival eagerly wolfing his way through a piece of pineapple, a small plate of yams before him. The diner looked up, the workings of his jaws gradually slowing as he watched the two pirates move along the opposite side of the table. He wiped juice from his chin as Clemens sat before him. Vejerin remained standing, a little behind the Captain’s right.
Clemens took in the dishevelled figure before him, its food-streaked, drawn, exhausted, sun-burnt face. Nothing remarkable. What was noteworthy was up further. The man couldn’t have been more than thirty years old but his hair was completely white. The man cleared his throat.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said.
The face before him betrayed no recognition of the gratitude.
“You’re Dutch,” Clemens eventually said.
“Yes.”
“You work for the VOC?”1
The man nodded.
“Yes.”
“What ship?”
“The Coen.”
Clemens blinked. He said nothing for a few seconds.
“Tell us what happened.”
* * *
With a total of three-hundred and fifty-five persons on board, including two-hundred and fifteen crew and one-hundred and forty soldiers the Dutch East Indiaman Coen had set sail from Rotterdam for Jakarta. Packed with building materials, paints, guns, wine and domestic goods, it was to deposit this cargo upon arrival at its destination and load up with spices from the VOC’s warehouses before returning to Holland.
The outward journey had been uneventful until just after they had passed Christmas Island, when with only a little over two hundred miles between them and Jakarta a powerful storm blew the vessel off course to the west.
It was a day and a half before the storm dissipated and the Coen, her sails badly damaged, could redirect herself toward Jakarta. The ship had only been limping eastward a few hours when the…‘singing’ reached the crew’s ears. A hypnotic, ethereal oo-ing spread throughout the boat in seconds, weaving its fairytale-like spell upon every single man on board. If he was not already there, he made his way up on deck where he stood silently, listening.
The ship was approaching a triangular-shaped atoll. However, not one soul on the Coen was interest in this uncharted landmass. One side of the atoll was partially obscured by three ‘islands’ of sorts, and it was these islands that were the focus of attention. Or rather, their inhabitants. The islands were roughly circular and varied in size, the biggest being about two-hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The second largest was maybe half the size of the big one with the smallest of the trio covering maybe only a fifth of the big one’s area.
The islands’ features were bizarrely identical, the only differing factor being the size of said features. At the centre of each island was a clump of palm trees, beneath whose fronds stood a group of three women, naked as the day of their birth. The producers of the singing, these dark-haired, olive-skinned beings of incredible beauty varied in size with each island, the trio on the small island being little taller than pre-pubescent children, though their state of feminine development was that of a mature woman.
The Coen dropped anchor and Captain De Groot assembled a landing party to investigate the islands, able seaman Anton Lammers being among those selected. The Coen’s longboat was lowered into the water and headed for the medium-sized island, the closest one to the ship. The short journey to the shore was a silent one, the only sound to be heard apart from the singing being the rhythm of the longboat’s oars in the water. Looking about, Lammers noted every pair of eyes on the boat fixed straight ahead upon the island women. Glancing upward at the Coen’s thronged deck Lammers regarded the similar sight there.
The longboat ground softly ashore and the landing party disembarked. After reaching the dry sand and walking a few steps on the beautiful white grains, Lammers felt a knot of concern in his stomach. He slowed to a stop. Something was not quite right. With the sand. It felt as though…the sand were moving ever so slightly up and down. Or something beneath it was. Lammers looked up ahead at the landing party which was moving further away from him. Obviously none of them had noticed this…anomaly. Just as he was beginning to worry if maybe his mind were failing, Lammers heard a voice snap at him to rejoin the group. Looking up to see the stern eyes of the boatswain fixed upon him, Lammers jogged after the party, scolding his eccentricity as he reached his comrades.
As the band neared the women the knot in Lammers’ stomach made its presence known once again, and his heart picked up speed. By the time he halted before the singers, the women mere feet away from him, his heart was racing in his chest. There was something terribly wrong with these women. But then of course, they were not women. Real women blinked occasionally. Their throats moved when they sang. Their mouths closed every now and then. And their chests moved for breath.
Despite the fact that alarm bells were ringing in Lammers’ head and a mental voice was telling him that this island was a horribly dangerous place and that he should turn and flee at once, Lammers had to know. He had to find out. He had always been curious, impetuous.
Aware that the ground was rising and falling beneath his feet again, and with greater intensity now (was it breathing? Breathing excitedly? With expectation perhaps?) he reached a quivering hand out toward the woman on the right. No-one commanded him to desist. Maybe they were all too entranced by the spectacle before them or were curious to have the mystery solved themselves and were content to have Lammers volunteer to answer it for them. Whatever the case may have been, Lammers’ enquiry went uncommented upon.
Lammers’ extended finger impacted the form beneath its left shoulder. Encountering the resistance of neither bone nor muscle it kept going. With a cry of revulsion Lammers yanked his hand backward. Holes flashed open all over the women’s bodies: on their faces, torsos, arms, legs. No area was spared. Each of the holes was about a quarter-inch in diameter, making the women look as though they had endured a particularly horrific medieval-style torture involving nails. Some of the men returned to life at this sudden, shocking development, startled grunts escaping them. A few backpedalled a little.
Lammers had had enough. He turned and burst through the men behind him, racing for the longboat. A few steps into his sprint the air filled with bloodcurdling shrieks and screams. Though he knew what was happening behind him was terrible beyond imagination and that he should simply keep running, his curiosity won the day once more.
He turned to witness an unspeakable nightmare. Most of his comrades lay writhing and shuddering on the sand, in various stages of disfigurement. The majority of their clothing had disappeared. What remained gaped with huge holes, exposing melting, boiling flesh. Plumes of steam rose from their squirming, liquefying forms. It was the clear fluid jetting from the holes in the women’s skin that was causing the atrocity, Lammers saw. Whatever it struck, it consumed.
One of the men still standing collapsed to the sand and the lines of spray that had been dissolving him were now free to leap toward Lammers, who darted to his left to avoid the dreadful substance. He escaped all but two of the deadly jets. He cried out as burning pains bloomed at the side of his right knee and at the tip of his right little finger. Instinctively he snatched at the aggrieved digit (the stricken flesh was already bubbling) with the fingers of his left hand. The pain lessened there somewhat but also began to speak from the thumb, index and middle finger of his left hand. His eyes flashing momentarily upon now unidentifiable puddles where the bone and musket-barrel of two soldiers were being quickly devoured, Lammers turned and ran.
The moans and whines of the dying men receded quickly behind him as he galloped toward the water, but the terrible singing remained, strong and clear amidst the charnel house. The ground beneath him was panting now, its eager rhythm almost sexual in intensity.
Lammers blazed into the water at speed, tumbling beneath its surface. Oblivious of the relief this afforded his burned fingers and knee, he scrambled into the longboat and began rowing. He had only performed two frantic strokes when the front of the boat began to rise up out of the water. A huge, reddish-pink flat shape was lifting it higher and higher. His stomach a wretched cauldron of panic and terror as he tilted backward (what new horror was this?) he noted similar mysterious giants emerging from the brine on both sides of the ascending boat. Water coursed down the bizarre shapes in floods as they climbed into the air, with Lammers observing vein-like lines streaking the highly-coloured, parabolic-shaped bodies.
His helpless craft almost perpendicular to the water, Lammers spilled from it into the shallows. His head emerged from the water just in time to witness the longboat thumping back down onto the surface a mere foot away from his skull. He looked up to see the shape that had lifted it, now free of the longboat’s weight, flick into line with the rest of its incredible brothers. A set of these shapes was ascending from various underwater points all around the island, all of them rising at exactly the same speed, curving as they ascended, the tip of each one arcing forward to meet an opposite number in the circle. To Lammers it was like watching some incredible corolla of petals coming together about a flower. When the orb was complete (it must have measured fifty feet from summit to base, Lammers surmised) the petal-things began to pulse softly as a unit, the gigantic pink bulb contracting and relaxing horribly, no doubt in sync with the loathsome throb of the sand concealed within, Lammers’ belaboured mind speculated.
Arrhythmic movement caught the corner of Lammers’ eye and his gaze descended to the base of the bulb where the skin of one of the petals was bulging outward sharply and intermittently, as though it were being struck from inside by something. There was a shade behind the sporadically appearing bulge, Lammers saw. Suddenly the blade of a dagger appeared through the pink wall, slicing a line downward to the water. A quivering hand appeared through the newly-created tear, its steaming skin burnt down to the bone in places. Its blasted fingers let the dagger fall into the water before it shakily pushed at the sides of the flap, widening it. A head, which was little more than a feebly-covered skull appeared. A few tufts of hair sprouted oasis-like from a few random locations in the sea of hideous burn-tissue above a shocking landscape that had once been a face. The liquefied contents of one eye-socket clung to a cooked rag of flesh adorning the demon’s cheekbone. Its remaining unharmed eye shone brightly at Lammers, full of some terrible emotion that Lammers had never witnessed in a human being before. The entity’s scalded, haphazard mouth opened and it emitted a few terrible raspy, guttural utterances before its head dropped forward and the dreadful apparition was still except for the flesh-coloured fluid dripping from its crown into the water which hissed and steamed upon receipt of the liquid. Only then did Lammers see the large signet ring on one of the ghoul’s fingers. He had seen that ring before. Captain De Groot had been wearing it.
There was the crack of musket-shot and Lammers looked up to see the curved pink wall soaring over him billow as holes appeared in its skin (was skin the right word? Yes he thought it was, this circular pink ball was the protective dermis of some terrible sea-plant monster, pulsing as it digested his comrades inside its bulb). Looking behind him Lammers saw a line of soldiers and some sailors at the bow of the Coen, each with a musket pointed at the throbbing abomination before him. Lammers’ stomach pitched horribly upon noticing the anomaly immediately beyond the ship. The biggest island was now much closer to the Coen than it had been when the unfortunate landing party had boarded the longboat. Had the ship moved? Lammers doubted very much that it had, it had been anchored securely. No, it was the island that had moved, demented as such a scenario may have sounded.
Lammers jumped to his feet and began shouting and screaming at the men by the Coen’s bow, gesticulating wildly as he tried to get them to move the ship away from the bizarre approaching danger. When nothing changed on the deck Lammers sat back down and began paddling frantically toward the Coen, the singing of the ‘women’ on the two remaining ‘open’ islands and the thunder of musket-shot providing a fittingly deranged soundtrack to his desperate little voyage of warning. He had almost reached the vessel when the hugely depressing sight of it beginning to rise from the water greeted his eyes. The same pink petal-type things that had closed over the middle-sized island ascended skyward before him on either side of the ship only these ones were truly huge, maybe twice as massive as the ones that had trapped the landing party. Up and up the twelve-hundred ton Coen went, its terrible lifters quickly becoming visible to a demoralised Lammers as the ship left the water. Climbing much slower than the ones not bearing any load, there were three petals raising the Coen, which stopped ascending suddenly.
Lammers spotted the reason. The anchor chain was pulled taut, the timber cat-head beam supporting it pitched at an angle from the ship it was never intended to endure. A few seconds later the resistance the anchor was encountering gave and the Coen resumed its ascent. Lammers watched helplessly as it was borne upward, beginning to angle away from him as the colossal petals beneath it began to turn inward.
When the ship was about thirty feet above him, the cat-head, damaged in the unorthodox raising of the anchor, came free of the ship. Seeing it hurtling directly toward him, Lammers leaped from the longboat. When his head re-emerged from the water he found the longboat in pieces. Grabbing hold of a long piece of flotsam he looked upward to see the Coen about fifty feet above him, perched at a perilous angle on the curving petals. Then it slid off of them into the centre of the forming bulb, multitudes of screaming men spilling from its deck as it went.
