Pirates & Ghosts Short Stories, page 78
Quimby stared in disbelief at Lieutenant Gribb, then began shaking his head slowly.
“Madness…some madness has gripped you…”
The door slammed behind Quimby, rebounding open with the force of his exit. Cudge took the opportunity to escape and dashed after him, likely never to be seen again.
“Thank you, sir,” said Shift-eye, when the echo of the door had quieted.
“Aye, well said,” said Scrawny. “But…if I might ask, sir…will you draw a card as well?”
Gribb’s heart began to race, for he had been asking himself just the same question since Cudge’s purse spilled onto the floor.
“It is an interesting problem we face, Scrawny,” said Gribb, stroking his chin in an effort to look introspective. In truth, he was paralyzed by the vastness of the danger and reward facing him. To not draw was the safest thing, to be sure. He was a well-respected man on the ship, and well liked, and would probably become captain of a ship of his own before too long. Earlier that day his prospects had felt solid, his future bright.
Yet in a single moment, in the drawing of a card, Cudge had become wealthier than Gribb could comprehend. Envy worked in him. Seeing Cudge’s fortune, he became violently dissatisfied with the life he had led thus far, and with the future he had built and imagined for himself.
“To draw is, at worst, to lose the known, finite, damnably ordinary lives we have led thus far,” Gribb mused. “At best…well, what if one of us draws the Sun, boys?”
“Aye aye, Captain!” Shift-eye said with a broad grin. “Bleed me dry if I’ll be content as a damned midshipman, while Cudge runs about in velvet and satin!” He pricked his thumb and left a smear of blood. “Deal me in, soothsayer!”
The soothsayer shuffled thrice and set his deck atop Shift-eye’s blood. When the soothsayer had said his sonorous phrase, Shift-eye drew a card, looked at it, and frowned.
“The hell is this?”
Shift-eye set the card down, face up. Its illustration depicted three old crones, spinning a great tapestry of shimmering silk. The thread from their wheel shone with every color at once. The tapestry they wove drew Gribb’s eye much as the horizon did during calm seas on a cloudless day. He might have stared forever, had the soothsayer not spoken.
“You are a man of infinite fortune,” said the soothsayer, leaning forward. “The Fates. He who holds this card may, once, rewrite the story of the world.”
“Bleed me…” Scrawny muttered. “That’s near as fine as the Sun, isn’t it?” He shook his head in wonder, and tried to meet his friend Shift-eye’s gaze.
Shift-eye’s attention fixed only on the card.
He stared at it, brow slowly furrowing, as he considered its powers. Gribb could not imagine what he would do in Shift-eye’s position. There were plenty of sad tales in Gribb’s past. That girl, back home, who had married the banker’s son. He could have her back with that card. But that was thinking small. He could make himself the son of a king. Or of an emperor! Even that was too small. A man with that card could make himself dictator of the world. Respect, admiration, wealth, and power, all at his fingertips for the taking.
What was Shift-eye thinking, as he stared at the card? Envy welled in Gribb more deeply than it ever had. What he would not give, what he would not do for that card!
“Bleed me!’ Scrawny said firmly, then pricked his finger and spread his blood. “With this string of luck, I can’t help but win! Watch, Shift-eye, I’ll get the Sun! Deal me in!”
Thrice shuffled, and placed on his blood.
“Draw, sir, if you would challenge fate.”
Scrawny drew eagerly. He turned his card with a flourish. His face went white, and his arm slack. He slumped forward, and the card fell face-up.
The Skull.
“Oh gods…”
Gribb stared at the card and at the dead sailor on the table. Scrawny’s eyes bulged and his face was drawn and pale, as though some long sickness had taken him. But he had been hale only a breath before. Gribb felt a crawling horror in the back of his skull – even more distressing, he felt the tension building within him unwind, if only slightly. Scrawny had played before him, and likely saved his life. More, the Skull had been drawn, which meant that Gribb could not draw it himself.
“How do I use it!” Shift-eye was demanding, waving his card beneath the soothsayer’s nose.
“You are blessed among mortals,” said the soothsayer, ignoring Shift-eye to address Scrawny’s corpse. “For your suffering is brought to an early end.”
“Bleed you!” Shift-eye screamed. “I want my friend back!”
Sadness passed over the soothsayer’s face. The first expression Gribb could recall the man wearing.
Scrawny sucked air in a ragged gasp, then flailed backward, upsetting his chair to sprawl on the ground, where he lay twitching, breathing hard, and struggling to right himself.
“Scrawny!” Shift-eye’s voice was choked with relief. He fell to cradle his friend and help him to his feet. Scrawny leaned against the table. His limbs quivered and his breath came in shallow gasps, but he was alive again. His eyes, glassy a moment ago, now bright and feverish, saw the soothsayer as a man overboard sees the fin of a shark.
“Get me out of here,” Scrawny rasped. He began shuffling toward the door, dragging Shift-eye after him. He looked back at Gribb, who now sat alone with the soothsayer. “Lieutenant?”
“I’ll join you men in just a moment,” said Gribb. His heart was racing. Everything in the room became brighter, and sharper. Especially the cards in the soothsayer’s hands.
“Lieutenant,” Scrawny said desperately. “It ain’t worth it!”
“Oh, come now,” said Gribb. He glared at the sailors. “Nothing’s changed, has it? The stakes are the same as when you played, aren’t they? One bad outcome doesn’t make it any more or less rational to take the risk, gentlemen. I will join you in a moment.”
The sailors exchanged a worried glance, then left, pulling the door solidly shut behind them.
“Alright then,” said Gribb, grasping the needle. He pressed it to his thumb. A flash of panic struck him, and he nearly threw the needle aside. The Skull was gone from the deck now, lying there upon the table where it had fallen from Scrawny’s hand, and what could be worse than death to dissuade Gribb from drawing? He might draw a card opposite to Cudge’s which left his purse always drained and flat. Or perhaps find himself cursed with syphilis, or boils, or lose his mind.
No matter, he decided. None of those consequences could stand against the possibility of godhood. No threat of finite suffering could dissuade him.
He pricked his thumb. A single drop fell.
The soothsayer shuffled. Every pass of the cards set Gribb’s hair on end. He shivered as the soothsayer placed the deck. His heart pounded, his blood rushed behind his ears so loudly he did not hear the soothsayer’s words. It astonished him to see his hand reach steadily for a card. He swallowed against a stubborn lump as his fingers touched thick paper, as they pulled the card free. He gritted his teeth, turned it, and slammed it to the table.
Its illustration was simple. A man, dressed in rags and a patched cloak, with a rucksack over one shoulder and a card-box in the other.
The soothsayer began to cackle.
“Oh you poor, poor unfortunate…” the soothsayer said, then interrupted himself with laughter.
“What!” said Gribb. That simple drawing, though it bore no malice, filled him with dread. His imagination sought a name for the image. The beggar, to curse him with poverty? The fool, to strip his mind of reason?
“What is it?” he demanded.
The soothsayer only laughed, and he began to collect the cards scattered about the table. As the soothsayer returned his card to the deck Gribb thought for a moment – only a moment, and only a glimpse – that he recognized the face of its ragged illustration as his own.
Impossible! Some trick of the light, or his paranoid, drunken mind.
Gribb slammed his fist on the table and grabbed the soothsayer by the front of his shirt.
“Tell me!” he said.
The soothsayer shuffled the deck, then put it into a small box of balsa wood. With the cards stowed he removed his cloak and set it on the table. His clothes were all rags, and for the first time Gribb saw his drawn skin, nearly showing his cheekbones and the joints of his arms and knuckles. His eyes were bright points in deep pits. An illusion had fallen away, it seemed, with the removal of that cloak.
“What curse have you laid upon me, specter?” Gribb said, steeling himself. “Why do you unmask yourself to me?”
The soothsayer, holding his bundled cloak and cards, stepped around the table. He pressed the bundle into Gribb’s hands, showed his pitted teeth, and cackled one last time.
The Buried Boat
Russ Thorne
Brother, they’re dead. All of them. Sarah, Eben, Jean Chrys. They died in front of me, all in the past hour.
No time. The dark is gathering. Christ, the blood is sticking my fingers together. I keep laughing. Don’t know why.
Sorry, this won’t be making much sense. Haven’t written anything longhand for years. Who has? Used to deleting and resending. But no signal here, and all the gear is lost anyway. So it’s just pen and paper, shivering in the cave mouth. I can’t leave. Going to get as much as I can down before they catch up with me and I have to turn around. Hope someone finds it.
Don’t turn around. It helps to write it down. Helps me resist.
Don’t turn around. Don’t, don’t, don’t.
I don’t know where to start with this. Must be quick. Shit, Tim, I’m going to die. Actually die. I’m so sorry for missing your stag do. And that time I bit you on the nipple when I was six. And breaking the vase and saying you did. All of it, really. Wish I’d been better, somehow.
So, we found Malthus and his whole team. How about that? Two centuries on. Even the locals hadn’t heard of them, or the caverns. They don’t go to the bay, too much effort to get through the mangroves. We joked that they were scared of a curse or something. They laughed. They don’t have time for that kind of nonsense – too busy trying to make a living from the sea to tell ghost stories about it, they told us. I believed them. Subsistence shark fishing in tiny canoes, no easy life. But I was sort of disappointed, I kind of wanted there to be some pirate curse, thought it would be exciting or romantic or some such bollocks. Galleons and the high seas, like those films that piss you off. Treasure and rum.
They were pretty clear though: no curse. But of course there was. Every time is cursed in its way, right? The darkness sort of reinvents itself. Like your mate Chutzpah or whatever his bastard name was. Chuston. City dickhead. Pirate. The curse of money. He would have loved it here. And he would have met some proper pirates.
Come on, focus, need to get this down. Hard to concentrate and the light is really going.
We found a curse all right, and we found the Malthus expedition. Keep thinking about the chances of it, and all from that one footnote in that one book Sarah found. The missing mangrove men. Hey, we’re mapping the mangroves there anyway, she said. Why not look? Next thing you know it’s a bumpy jeep from ’Tana all the way to Toliara. Pirogue with rice sack sails to Soliara. Sleep in an abandoned roofless hospital in the village, and the sky, man…I didn’t know it could be so black. The stars so bright.
More canoes to the river mouth, villagers took us into the old bay. Not a bay anymore, the mangroves have taken it. Took a full day to pick our way through, the locals just shrugged and left us to it, couldn’t understand why we wanted to make a map of their swamp. Looking back, I can’t fathom it either. You just try to fill your life while you run from death, I guess. But he’s fucking well caught up with me now.
Right. We finally came out in the late afternoon sun. Sweating, soaked. Bitten. Huge cliffs hemming us in on three sides, mangroves the fourth. I wish you could have seen it. Lemurs chucking rocks at us, weird little sand crabs hiding in the holes we dug to shit in. So green, so peacefully noisy with crazy wildlife.
The locals said they’d come back in a week. That was four days ago. I’m not going to make it beyond the next hour. The whispers are getting more clear. That’s how it starts. A whisper like the distant breeze, and then closer. Closer. Then they say your name. I’m so scared, brother, here all alone.
So, our first day was standard stuff. Almost. We started the survey, set up some camera traps for wildlife, cursed the mosquitoes. It was calm. But right away it was different here. The mangroves…you won’t believe me. No-one will at home. But we have film of it, samples, photos. It’s all in the waterproof canister. If anyone finds it, look, learn, run like hell and don’t ever come back here. Leave this place alone.
They bleed, Tim. The mangroves bleed.
And they’re not quite right. They’re distorted. Lumps, sharp spikes. The seed pods crack and ooze this kind of stinking black sludge. You expect the brackish water and the close air under the mangroves, but here it was a different kind of heavy. We all felt it after the first full day. Came out feeling irritable and angry, and we couldn’t quite see properly. Darkness on the edge of our vision.
The blood was worse though. We had to hack a few bits away at one point and they just bled, like we’d taken a machete to an arm. Thick red blood. Not sap. It was blood. Like human blood. After a while the stumps clotted and scabbed.
We should have left then. Only we thought we were on to a whole new species, or a totally unique mangrove. Can’t blame us for being curious. Only we know what curiosity did, right? But there were other things too. JC stood on something hard and metallic, had a feel around. It was a sword. We couldn’t get it fully out because the roots had grown around it; it was part of the tree. So we looked harder at the roots and that kind of thing was everywhere: nails, weapons, strange little flashes of metal that Eben reckoned might have been coins, swallowed up by the wood.
* * *
Don’t turn around. Fuck. So hard not to. Whispers are becoming words, Tim. “Here, here,” they’re saying.
I know you won’t believe me. I understand. But ghosts, brother. They’re real. They’re a thing. Who knew?
Don’t worry, I’m laughing too. And crying. Taken a few pics with the disposable camera I nicked from your wedding (sorry, again). So there’s some of me and JC in the gents at the venue being twats, and some of the last few moments of my life. I sort of hope you never see them. But I want you to believe me. They were fucking murdered out of thin air and I watched it, I watched it happen. Couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t even see what was doing it.
OK, so the skulls were inevitable, really. No, wait. First of all – the nights. The first night we were tired and didn’t notice. But the second, after our weird day in the mangroves, we did. I think Sarah said it first. There’s no sound, she said. And she was right. As dark fell, so did silence. Throughout the day, noise, lemurs, insects, birds – the Madagascar Medley, we called it. Then night, and totally silent. We couldn’t even hear the sea beyond the trees. It wasn’t natural. It was like someone had pressed mute on the whole world. Our voices sounded hard and echoing. It’s like we’re disturbing a tomb or something, Sarah said. No-one really slept that night, we just lay there in this total, blanketing silence. I’ve never wanted the sun to rise so much. The first bird singing was…it was like being reborn. I don’t understand why we didn’t pack up and leave then. Wish we’d listened to Eben. It’s not right here, we shouldn’t be here. He kept saying it.
Anyway, the skulls. You’d miss them if you weren’t really looking, but we really were. Right deep inside the clefts of the trees. They’d been swallowed into the bark and lifted out of the ground, black eyes looking out. Or you’d just see a shiny dome, or a bit of a toothy smile. It’s all on the camera. I reckon you’ll see how shit-scared we all were.
Then the storm came out of nowhere and we rushed all the gear into this shallow cave. I think we would have tried to leave if it wasn’t for that. We hadn’t even bothered looking for the caverns at that point, been too taken up with the trees and the swords and the blood. Fuck me, I feel so weird writing this down. You should know that the whispers are mocking now. We’re here, they’re saying. Time’s up. Look.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Not yet.
* * *
The cave was tall and dry and warm. We figured we’d shelter there until the rain passed, but it didn’t. It hammered down all day, thunder, lightning, the works. A fog poured out from the sea, low to the ground, setting everything adrift. We were floating. The trees shuddered. Not swayed – they shuddered. At one point every single one of the camera traps went off at the same time and lit the trees up from the inside. Briefly, an army of skeletons was standing between us and the sea. Then it was trees again. I think I sobbed. Sarah and CJ just held each other. Me and Eben were islands alone in the storm.
We had to spend the night in there and of course, rooting around for space to sleep, we found the hole. Rigged up our lights to see properly, and there it was: a hole in the back of the cave wall. We looked closer and it wasn’t a rock face, it was a man-made wall cleverly covered up so you’d just think it was rock. Someone had been there before us and opened it up.
Malthus. It had to be. No sign of anything else in the cavern, but as soon as we stuck a light through the hole and peered into the blackness beyond, there was a stash of rucksacks and rope. All incredibly old and fragile, but preserved in the still air.
